Orbital

Thirty The Lab

My lab is a round cylinder ten feet wide and thirty feet long. It was the upper stage of an iCosmos rocket launched into orbit and attached to the Sagan for about the same price as a corporate jet.

Cabinets line one wall with various parts, materials and tools. On the other side is a workbench designed for microgravity and a large 3D printer that can work with just about any material you can feed it.

Rather than sending up a prototype on whatever ship is available and waiting, the engineers down below can transmit the plans of whatever they want tested and have results back in hours instead of weeks of months.

At the far end of the lab is an airlock where most of the testing can take place. Within that chamber I can test the effects of zero-g and vacuum.

For more intense testing, I can exit the other end of the airlock and go into actual space to see how something stands up in the temperature extremes of full sunlight and complete darkness.

To minimize the amount of danger I’m exposed to, there’s one other occupant in the lab; Danger Debbie, a very life-like crash test dummy filled with sensors and simple ranges of motion.

She’s not as sophisticated as the robots you see walking around Google campuses, but in the dark…she might do just fine.

Only five years ago a space lab like this would have been a billion-dollar investment. Now it’s merely a hundred million dollar project. In fact, as evidenced by the Tiki bar liquor section and the onboard chef, it’s become quite fashionable for corporations to conduct research in space or even have their own modules. The actual owner of this one is a government contractor working for the military developing next generation space suits and tools.

I’ve heard that the US/iCosmos station already has enough leases to be profitable. Rumor has it that Vin is thinking about building something an order of magnitude even larger. Crazy times.

Besides the equipment and shapely test-dummy, the other important feature of the lab is the secure communication system.

While I can carry on video conferencing from my space-closet hotel suite, there’s no way to know who might be listening in. Someone wouldn’t even have to tap the network. They could just put a glass to the wall and hear me talk.

This module is designed to government specs and has radio wave blocking insulation as well as a special white noise generator that keeps someone from bouncing a laser off the hull and picking up a conversation — something we’ve been doing to the Russians and the Chinese.

I strap myself into the work station and open up a video feed with Ops.

Baylor’s face appears on the screen. “So you’re all checked in?”

“Yep. Exactly what you said it would be.”

“Have you met the DARPA folks yet?”

“No. They’re across the hall. I expect I’ll run into them shortly. I’ve met some of the others. It’s an interesting assortment.”

“I’m sure you fit right in.”

“Actually, that’s the reason I’m calling. Tell Jessup that I got a pretty good grilling from Tamara Collins. She’s very suspicious of me.”

“We’re not too surprised. She’s a bit anti-military.”

“How anti is she to the part of her paycheck they pay for?”

“Did you tell her anything?”

“Of course not. I just played dumb.”

“She probably runs that routine on everyone when they come up. Anything else?”

“Yeah, security in this section is terrible. The thumbprint scanners don’t work, so our DARPA folks have been using number codes to get into this wing. I’ll find out if that’s the case for their individual modules.”

“Curious.” She types into her computer. “They didn’t report this.”

“Probably because it’ll mean a mile of paperwork and a hold on their work in the lab.”

“Jessup will watch this video, but I’ll make sure to make a note of that and see if we can find out when that happened.”

“Apparently there’s some kind of communication interference affecting the wireless locks. I might take an EVA with a scanner and see if I find anything interesting.”

“Okay. But don’t remove it if you find something. We don’t want anyone knowing that we know.”

“Do I look like an amateur?”

“I reserve judgement. In the mean time, I’m sending up some printer files.”

“For what?”

“The work you’re supposed to be pretending to be doing.”

“Right. Right. I guess I can’t spend all my time snooping around in my deerstalker cap.”

“No. And when you get back to your quarters, call your friend-girl and tell her how awesome it is up there. In case people are listening, and we should assume that they are, you need to at least pretend that you’re a normal human with normal human interactions. Although I’m not sure if I’d call what you two have as normal.”

“We’re just good friends.”

Baylor, normally fairly reserved, does an eye roll. “Maybe you need to work on that.”

“She’s a co-worker.”

“She’s a contractor and the fraternization policies haven’t been written yet for Space Ops.”

“Anything else?” I say a little testily.

“This thumbprint thing has me concerned. It doesn’t exactly narrow down the suspects, does it?”

“No. It kind of broadens the list considerably.”

“Or maybe that was the intent?”

“We need to get our Russian spymaster on this.”

After we end the feed she sends over the files and I plug them into the 3D printing system to get them started.

Satisfied that I didn’t break anything, I leave them be and head back to the hotel, but not before I set a small camera on the door to let me know if anyone decides to enter my module when I’m not there.

I doubt anyone would try, but you can’t be too careful.