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Chapter 139 – Mission ImprobableAlex was horrified. She was watching the news with her mom and dad. Shar wasn’t interested, and was up in her room.
It was just-released footage of Captain Samantha Carter calmly arguing with NASA in Houston that she should be allowed to pilot the shuttle in a trajectory right into the sun.
Sam was not only trapped in an enclosed space with a man-eating alien lifeform, but she was ‘infected’, too. She had spores on her, and in her, and she had the thing’s nucleic acids in her body, doing who knew what ickiness.
Her mom carefully asked, “This is your Sam Carter, isn’t it?”
Alex nodded miserably. “She’s our world’s version of other-Sam. She’s really smart. But she’s a physicist. This is a biochem problem, and their biochemist was probably the guy who got infected and released all the samples and infected the rest of the crew.”
Her dad asked, “But Jack has biochem experts already, right?”
She scowled. “Yeah, but this isn’t an SRI tasking. We’re not even in the top five agencies. Willow figured even the Russian Space Force would get called before the SRI did.”
Her mom complained, “Well, that’s short-sighted. Who’s saving the world a couple times a month? You! And Jack’s group.”
Alex suddenly remembered other-Sam telling her about getting ‘infected’ by a symbiote and it taking over her body and she almost died, and then after the symbiote died, Sam was really sick for days. Just how linked were all these universes?
* * *
Maggie Walsh hurried into his office. “We have a problem.”
He looked up from a report. “Severity?” But he knew from her expression and her haste that it had to be serious.
She answered, “Right now? Yellow. Potential? Extreme red. We hijacked a copy of Captain Carter’s transmission to Houston, and we got the full nucleic acid dataset. It’s obviously a fungoid that we don’t have a resistance to.”
He didn’t bother to point out that this was probably not obvious to anyone else. Instead he asked, “You mean ‘we’ in the Collective?”
She frowned. “No, I mean ‘we’ as in all carbon-based plant and animal life. If we don’t stop her from bringing this down, it could colonize our planet and wipe out all other life.”
“You’re sure about this?”
She nodded. “Yes. This is nothing like our projects, where we always have controls to protect ourselves from the products. Even the Davenport project after that extremely clumsy sabotage.”
He said, “Very well then, let’s address this at once. I think we should initiate Operation Salvage.”
Maggie actually looked surprised for a moment. It was so hard to surprise her. “How will we get the intel to her?”
He explained, “Through our mole in India. If the SRI can trace it back that far, then they’ll figure out who India One is.”
She just smirked. “They already know. It’s in our latest data transmission from our mole.”
“Excellent. I’ll let you get to it.”
* * *
General R.J. ‘Pete’ Peterson looked up from the reports he was poring over. He hated to throw away someone like Captain Carter, especially when he had been friends with her late father, but every biochemist who reviewed the data and Carter’s transmissions ended up saying the same thing. “This is an amazing opportunity to advance our knowledge base … even if there is a very real chance we could end up wiping out all animal life on Earth.”
Even the isolation protocols they were using at the ISS could fail. Despite what Halvorsen kept claiming, things could go wrong. Just in case, he was making sure there were plans in place. He needed to make sure someone could either boost the ISS into HEO or else drop the ISS toward the Earth’s atmosphere, blow it into small enough fragments with conventional weaponry launched from F-15’s, and then let the pieces burn up during re-entry.
His cellphone buzzed in the Morse code signal that told him his adjutant was bringing in someone important while making it look like he was just walking in on the general because of the importance of the guest. It worked great on Senators and Congressmen and four-stars. He closed two of the four folders he had open, and blanked his computer screen.
There was a quick knock on the door, and his adjutant Major Harwell walked in with a crisp, very British man. The general stood up and shook hands across the desk as the major did the introductions.
“Professor Bernard Quatermass, this is General Peterson. General, this is Professor Quatermass, the head of the British Aerospace Group, within the ESA.”
The general decided to go for the friendly approach, because Quatermass didn’t look like the type of man who could be cowed, and his reputation was of a stiff devotion to science. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”
Quatermass took off his trenchcoat and said, “Thank you for having me here. Eli Colby was one of my students when he was working on his doctorate, and he’s been a good friend and colleague since then. I feel like I’ve let him down somehow.”
He sighed. “I feel like we’ve let all of them down. You can view all of Carter’s transmissions, but our protocols should have been adequate. They weren’t. We’ve lost three astronauts, and Carter thinks we should just write her off.”
Quatermass frowned. “You can’t do that. We have to figure out a way to save her. Can I speak with her?”
He smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Maybe you can talk her out of this idea that she should pilot the shuttle into the sun and take care of the problem.”
Quatermass pointed out, “But it won’t take care of the problem. It will only delay it. We now know these molecules are out there in our solar system, and sooner or later, we’ll encounter them again, either when a large enough, porous enough meteor brings some down to Earth, or when we run into some while exploring outer space. For all we know, there are asteroids or moons that are now covered in the stuff. We have to analyze these compounds and figure out ways to deal with them the next time.”
The general said, “If you tell Carter what you just told me, then I’m sure she’ll listen to you.”
Quatermass frowned. “That’s fine. But if the ISS loses isolation, we need a plan in place. The Russians tell me they can get a Soyuz up to the ISS in well under six hours, if we don’t need a perfect docking maneuver. We should plan on having one ready, just in case. We can evacuate the ISS, let the automatic pilot boost it up into high Earth orbit where it’ll be safe and out of the way for as long as we need, and then the Soyuz flies up to orbit and picks up our evacuees for a hasty return.”
Major Harwell added, “And the ISS can boost up to HEO for a lot less fuel than it would need to drop into atmosphere for a re-entry burn-up.”
The general knew all that. You couldn’t do a decent job in his position and not know the ins and outs of rocketry and basic orbital mechanics. But he just nodded and said, “Major, have the professor outline his plan to our ISS Interface Team, then notify the ISS and ask the Russian Space Administration for cooperation. They have a man on the ISS, so they’ll say yes. Then make sure the professor has a nice, long, convincing chat with Captain Carter.”
He waited until Quatermass was out of the office and the door was closed. Then he made a phone call. “Steve? It’s Pete. The professor the Brits sent over here has a good idea for handling a quarantine failure on the ISS, and I think he’ll be able to talk Carter around. If she survives, you’re going to have to give her some pretty impressive medals, and probably that promotion, too.”
General Jackson said, “Sounds good. I know Riskov in the RSA, and I’ll call him and put in a good word for you, so hopefully the RSA won’t give you any problems. Meanwhile, we’re in a bind here. I’ve been trying to get Jack O’Neill’s team involved in this so we can get Terawatt, but your people are insisting that we have to go through proper channels, which means Kremer’s Strategic Command boys, and he’s still pissed off at Terawatt and her secret computer cracker pal. I can’t imagine they’re happy with him, either.”
“Damn. Do you really think Terawatt could help up there?”
Jackson insisted, “Are you kidding? O’Neill’s been shipping her around the world in a Blackbird. With no pressure suit, no oxygen, and no temperature protection. Just a modified canopy with a three-inch port she can ooze out of. Pete, she dives out of a freaking Blackbird without a suit at maybe thirty or forty thousand feet and Mach 0.8, and then flies in to the rescue at hundreds of miles an hour. If there’s anyone on Earth who could help us now, it’s got to be her.”
“Hmm … I’ve got an idea …”
* * *
Jack O’Neill looked at the Caller ID before he answered the phone.
Crap. It was Colonel McCoy at the max security prison site. That was never good.
He answered, “Colonel McCoy. How are things at the Charles Montgomery Burns State Penitentiary?”
McCoy said, “At least I know that one, sir. I had to look up your Gouffre Martel reference, and not knowing how to spell it was a problem.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry sir, you got me off-track. We just received an email for Clare Tobias. We have no idea how an outsider found out where we’re holding our supers, much less how to get at our firewall and put something on our internal mail server.”
Jack had a pretty good idea without even looking at the message or the email headers.
“Anyway, it’s in code. Maybe about ten pages worth. And the code looks like a book code, with every piece a number, a dash, and another number. Whatever the book is, it’s got a pretty decent page count.”
Jack just said, “Forward a copy ASAP to our dead drop. I’ll sic my IT people on it. Meanwhile, don’t tell Tobias about it, but plan on having her meet with me via conference call really soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack hung up and pressed speed-dial 1.
“Oh, hi! What’s up? Is this about Sam Carter?”
He made an effort not to grin like a goofball just from hearing her voice. “I have no idea if this is connected to Carter, but it’s possible. Can you crack a book code? Someone just sent one to where we’re holding Clare Tobias.”
Willow paused for a second. “Well, I wrote a program to try, but it’s not all that great, and it works by taking every book I could give it electronically and plugging in the first thousand ‘words’ of the code and using an artificial language parser to make a decision whether the output is sensible or not, and if so it flags it, and if not it tries another book. I’ve got all of the Gutenberg Project for resources, plus every version of the Bible I could find online, and every other online source I could access, but the book could just be the latest hardcover Merriam-Webster dictionary, which is still under copyright so it’s not online anywhere, and then we’d be stuck.”
He grimly pointed out, “According to the NID files we were able to get, Miss Tobias has a nearly eidetic memory and spoke at least eight languages fluently, so this could be any book she has already memorized, and it doesn’t have to be in English either.”
Willow told him, “I did toss in books in twenty-three other languages just in case.”
He burst into a grin. “We’re not worthy!”
She switched to a husky purr. “Oh, I think you’re pretty worthy, and I intend to show you the next time we can get some free time together.”
He tried to ignore the way his body was responding. “Not the time or the place, honey. There should be a copy of an email waiting for you in the SRI drop.”
“Okay, I’m on it. Even if I’d rather be on your —”
“WILL! NOT NOW!”
* * *
Sam nodded again. She knew a lot more astrophysics and orbital mechanics than Professor Quatermass, but he knew a lot more exobiology. And he was right about research on this lifeform.
The two of them had engaged in a long discussion about the physics of her flightpath and the shuttle’s re-entry performance specs. Since then, they had been discussing the thing’s biochemistry.
They definitely agreed that as long as the shuttle had warmth and light and power, the thing would keep growing. Even if it was only getting energy from heat and visible light, it would keep growing, and the shuttle was hundreds of degrees warmer than the comet the lifeform had been on.
The professor was clear that standard wide-spectrum disinfectants should work on the thing, but UV would not. She’d figured that out hours ago. It apparently treated most wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation like a tasty, nutritious meal.
She had already searched the shuttle from stem to stern for anything she could use against the creature, so she knew she was out of luck. There was supposed to be a small bottle of non-volatile disinfectant in the shuttle stores for Eli to use for clean-ups, but it was empty now. She didn’t know whether that meant he had used it all up in a desperate attempt to stop the original infection, or if he had been controlled by the lifeform and he had disposed of it. Not that it really mattered. She had nothing to use against the creature except fire, which wasn’t an option unless she dived the Atlantis into the sun and burned up the entire shuttle.
* * *
Alex scooted Shar inside the house just as her tPhone went off. It was the ‘My Little Pony’ theme song, so she had a good idea who was calling. And that Willow had been messing with her ringtones again.
She stepped inside and said, “Shar, it’s Terawatt business. Can you do your homework and go watch ‘The Iron Giant’ for a while?”
“Oh, sure! I’m done with homework. The science stuff was mega-easy after Uncle George showed me some cool stuff last night.” She headed off into the living room so she could watch her movie on the big TV screen.
Alex flew into the home office and shut the door with her TK. “Terawatt here.”
Jack sounded unhappy. “Brigadier General Jack O’Neill speaking, Terawatt. The President asked to speak to you personally. I think they’re dodging around the SRI, but don’t take it personally. Okay?”
“Okay. Umm, you don’t have the President on hold or anything, do you?”
He said, “No, but I do have one of his people on hold until you were available. I’ve kept them waiting over an hour. He’s pretty peeved at me.”
Well, that wasn’t fair. Just because Jack wasn’t calling her while she was still in school or going to pick up Shar, that didn’t mean he was being a jerk to the White House. She told him, “Okay, general, put them on.”
A voice she didn’t know came on. “Is this Terawatt?”
“Yes, it is. Who am I speaking with?” Shoot, she should have said ‘with whom am I speaking’ instead!
The guy said, “This is Wallace H. Howell. I’m one of the President’s new staffers. We didn’t meet when you were at the White House. The general has had me on hold for an hour and a half.”
Alex lied, “That would be because I was dealing with a possible super-powered crisis in another state, and I had made it clear that I was unavailable until I cleared my ‘standby’ signal on my communications system.”
“Oh. I thought maybe the general was just … well, have you spent any amount of time dealing with General O’Neill?”
Alex tried not to smile. “I have, and I know what you mean. But he wasn’t pulling anything. He simply couldn’t contact me while I was busy.”
Mr. Howell said, “If you can hold for just a few seconds, I’ll get the President on the line. He wants to talk to you personally about a non-SRI crisis we’re hoping you’d help us with.”
Alex suddenly wanted to jump up and down with excitement. She was pretty sure what this had to be.
The President’s distinctive voice came on. “Terawatt?”
She made sure she was using the right voice. “Yes, Mister President?”
“I’m sorry to make an end run around the people you work with and trust, but we have a crisis that you may be able to handle. Have you been keeping up with the news on the Atlantis disaster?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. Then she fibbed a little. “My research people have been interested in talking with Captain Samantha Carter for some time, primarily about some astrophysics and unified field theory questions.”
“Well, that’s not my area of expertise, so I’ll take your word on it. But she’s going to be docking at an isolation module of the International Space Station in a matter of hours, and we have a way of getting you up there quickly. But you’re the only person on Earth who could survive the trip, because it’s in a cargo capsule without an environment-control system. That means it’s not without risk. My science advisor tells me the DragonX cargo capsule can get you into orbit in eight or nine minutes and get you within three miles of the space station and at nearly the same speed, all in a hair under four hours. Are you willing to go, and assist Captain Carter and the station crew? If there’s a quarantine failure, NASA and the ESA do have plans to get everyone back home safe and sound, while putting the space station in a safe orbit.”
She said, “Yes, I would be willing to assist. But in exchange, I want your word that Captain Carter will get a medal for valor and a promotion, and I want your word that I will have the opportunity to meet with her about scientific matters in the near future.”
She could hear the amusement in his voice. “You’re not much of a negotiator, ma’am. NASA’s already insisting on the captain getting that medal and promotion. And I imagine she’d be dying to meet with a superheroine who flew up to the ISS just to save her.”
Alex didn’t tell him that there was no way she was going to say no, no matter what he had said.
* * *
Jack put his poker face on before the camera and the screen warmed up for the conference call.
The picture came on, and he could see Clare Tobias in an off-white coverall, sitting in front of a solid concrete wall. She gave him a smirk. “You wanted to chat, Colonel? Or are you planning on tasering me again, only remotely?”
Jack gave her a look. “While I’d love to tase you again, Clare, I have something else to talk about. Namely, the email you received from your Breslynn friends.”
She smiled smugly. “Couldn’t crack it, huh?”
He wasn’t letting this bitch get a rise out of him. He calmly said, “It’s a book code. As you know, they’re solid, unless someone tells you which book.”
She said, “I want to see the first two hundred ‘words’ before we go any farther.”
Jack had been figuring she’d insist on a lot more than that. He smiled. “Why not go whole hog and have a peek at the first five hundred?” Then he spoke to the guards. “Go ahead and give her what I authorized.”
Clare reached out and took the printed sheets. He could see her eyes flicking over the first page as she read the code numbers and worked out the decryption from memory.
She finally muttered, “Son of a bitch!” She put the papers down. Her smug grin was utterly gone. “The codebook is the Collins Robert French Dictionary, first edition, so you can verify everything. This is a message from Dr. Margaret K. Walsh, who I gather is not one of your close personal friends. She says the alien life in the shuttle is definitely a fungoid with nucleic acids that our planet’s lifeforms have no resistance to, and analogues to segments of DNA that would create fruiting bodies that would probably release millions of spores. This is a threat to all life on Earth. I am to cooperate fully in any way you ask. Even revealing details about our organization is acceptable if I have absolutely no other choice to save the planet. I am to go up to the ISS if needed, or go wherever you direct, but I am to ensure complete, permanent quarantine or else the complete destruction of the lifeform no matter what I have to do. Any questions?”
Oh, he had hundreds. He just didn’t think Clare would answer many of them. Yet. He asked, “One: do you guys have anyone on the ISS already? Two: does Wacky Maggie have any ideas on what can kill this stuff without killing everything else?”
She answered, “Fine. One, I have no fucking idea. If it’s in the email, you’ll have it decrypted in no time. Two, not yet.”
He nodded. “Swell. We’re giving you the rest of the email, in case it helps you. And you’ll have a team picking you up any time now.”
He disconnected and turned to the screens off to his right. “Burn, have you verified the codebook?”
“Oh, yeah, this looks great. I’ll have the complete text to you in a minute.”
He looked at the other screen. “Colonel Finn, you have a go.”
Finn said, “We’re nearly there now, sir. I look forward to the moment when she tries a fast one on Lupo.”
Jack smiled. “Try and get it on video. Super slo-mo, if possible.”
* * *
Sam woke up. For a fraction of a second, she didn’t remember why she was staring at the stars.
Then she remembered everything. She had been sleeping in the only safe place she had left: outside the shuttle itself.
She was in her skinsuit, with the helmet and backpack. She had her chronometer on her wrist, under the tight sleeve of the skinsuit, so she could feel when its alarm went off. There was no way she was going to be hearing it in space.
She was a hundred and thirty feet from the EVA hatch, dangling on the end of the EVA tether. She was as far from the lifeform as she could get without drifting off into space, never to return. And she was a little too warm for comfort. People talked about the ‘icy cold of space’ but they really had no idea what they were talking about. Heat was transferred through conduction, convection, and radiation. There were so few molecules impacting with her body out here that she was dealing with what was very nearly zero conduction and convection. And she wasn’t picking up heat energy from solar radiation, because she had placed herself in the shadow of the shuttle. Still, her own body generated heat, and she had no way to shed that heat while she was out here.
Sleeping tethered to the exterior of the shuttle was relatively safe. The probability of getting hit by a meteoroid or even a micrometeoroid in less than eight hours was vanishingly small. She hadn’t seen any sign that the lifeform was both intelligent enough to recognize her as a threat while she was out here, and also enough of a tool user to figure out how to open the hatch and disconnect the tether.
She gave her end of the tether a tug, and she drifted in toward the hatch. She coiled up the tether as she went. She was in no hurry to face that thing again, and she had time before she needed to oversee the next set of computer-controlled burns to put her in the right orbit and speed for docking with the ISS.
She still thought that having the space station in low earth orbit was a poor arrangement. But as long as regular flights to and from Earth had to go by shuttle or Dragon capsule or Soyuz or X-37, having the ISS in LEO worked well. She had lobbied for moving the station up into high earth orbit, in conjunction with the development of transport systems better than the X-37 or the Dragon, but she was still in the minority.
She would feel a lot better about it if the Envisat and four other possible ‘patient zero’ cases for Kessler Syndrome didn’t have orbits in low Earth orbit, too. She had written up the specs for a ‘re-director’ satellite-based device that would let NASA and ESA sweep lots of small threats out of low earth orbit, making things safer in the long run. But she knew there was little chance that anyone in authority was going to buy off on her re-director, ever since Riskov’s people in the RSA had labeled her design a ‘hunter-killer weapon’. Nobody wanted weapons in space. And she hated to admit it, but her re-director could be easily used as an anti-satellite weapon.
She moved through the EVA hatch and edged past the ‘hydroponic garden’. The thing had grown some more, and now the panels were in danger of breaking loose. She could see they were straining at the fasteners. She moved into the control cabin, shut the connecting door, and used part of a roll of duct tape to seal the seams around the edges of the door, just in case the thing decided it was hungry.
She was now close enough to Earth that the signal lag was ignorable. “Captain Sam Carter calling Mission Control. I am in designated flightpath, and will commence Burn C-1 in thirty-four minutes.” She had already run through Burn Series A and Burn Series B, just to get the shuttle on the current flightpath. She still had hours before she was going to be running through Series D to get her lined up for docking, and then Series E for the final docking maneuvers.
“Captain Carter, this is Mission Control. We have made arrangement for docking at the ISS at a separated module, and we have a minimal-risk flightpath. Commander Elliot’s team has set things up for a Level 4 quarantine.”
She checked. “Is that Commander Vince Elliot, USAF?”
“Yes, captain, it is.”
Well, shit. She had been hoping to avoid that little problem.
* * *
Clare looked at her new outfit. Underthings which fit, and BDUs in a desert camo pattern. The boots even fit, and were broken in. That bastard O’Neill didn’t miss much.
Now all she had to do was play along, stop this lifeform, and then beat the holy crap out of O’Neill’s team before making another escape.
She still could hardly believe she had gotten taken down by a teenaged girl with a jury-rigged camera flash. That was beyond humiliating.
The heavy door opened, and she looked over to see which loser homo inferior soldiers she was going to be stuck with for the mission. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping them alive.
She saw who was walking into the room, and she refused to flinch.
Riley Finn — with a lieutenant colonel’s insignia on his shoulder — gave her a nod. “Tobias. I’m Finn. Let’s go.”
Behind him came a massive sergeant and a petite Latina. The Latina said, “I’m Lieutenant Lupo, and this is Sergeant Carlson. You can call me Lupo. Or ‘lieutenant’. Or ‘sir’. Or ‘hey you’ if you want me to kick your ass.”
Fuck. She was facing three other Breslynn Orphans. She had some training in martial arts and weaponry, but nothing like the three of them. Maybe she was going to have to worry about the three of them bothering to keep her alive.
Or maybe this was the perfect opportunity. Maybe O’Neill had outsmarted himself.
All she had to do was to talk just one of them into joining The Collective.
* * *
Colonel Roger McNamara wiggled a little as he tried to get comfortable. Sitting in an X-37B orbital vehicle while in a full spacesuit was about as comfortable as wearing a cardboard robot costume and being stuffed into a laundromat clothes dryer.
He glanced around. His pilot was in a seat up front, with Markham acting as co-pilot and Webb seated behind him. Their gear for the primary plan and several emergency backup plans was all strapped to the walls or secured in lockers.
They were just about to begin takeoff. They were at a secret NID site in Nicaragua, south of Punta Gorda, which meant that they were much farther south than the tip of Florida, and therefore the Earth’s rotation would help get them up to speed a lot faster. Other than that, the place was a little hellhole. As soon as they launched, every tracking station on Earth would zero in on this spot. Too bad for the people still on the ground, because everyone who counted was either in the X-37 with him, or else flying the Scaled Composites White Knight Two which was going to lift them high enough for them to execute their own launch maneuver.
And they didn’t have to worry about damaging the ISS when they docked, so they could move much faster at the end of the flight. The Russians had made it from launch to docking in under six hours. He was planning on cutting that record in half.
He might have to cut a few other things in half, too. He was fine with that.
* * *
Alex flew south toward Edwards Air Force Base. She was pretty nervous. The DragonX cargo capsule was designed to launch supplies up to the International Space Station, not provide comfy rides for passengers. Still, she could just stay in her silvery morph for the whole trip.
The nice NASA engineers she’d talked to had explained the whole deal to her. But she was still a little nervous. She was about to get launched into orbit, without an environment-control system. Oh, she knew she could stay in her morph for a lot longer than she’d need for this trip. Still, stuff could go wrong.
She had never in her life imagined that someday she would get to be an astronaut and fly up into space.
And maybe Sam would be nice to talk to, even if she’d never believe just why Terawatt liked her so much already.