Orbital

Thirty-Two Science Fair

Dr. Ben Attwell is floating in front of the entrance to the American secure section when I go back into the Sagan zero-g section. He’s in his early fifties and has the same friendly smile I saw in his dossier.

Although it wouldn’t be out of character to know who everybody is on this station, I let him make the introduction.

“Mr. Dixon. Pleasure to meet you,” he says, shaking my hand. “Tamara says you’ve already been in your lab. Think you’ll be able to get some work done up here?”

“Hopefully. If I can stay clear of the happy hour.”

He puts a thumb on the lock and the door slides open. I guess it didn’t decide to be as temperamental this time.

“I looked up your file and saw your government classification. I’m allowed to give you a tour of some of the DARPA labs if you’d like, and introduce you to my co-workers.”

“That would be great.”

This guy is trying way too hard. He suspects I’m up here because of the breach and wants to show how open and guilt-free he is.

Which makes me think that while he’s probably innocent of the theft and sabotage, he knows he may have slipped up in his security protocols which led to what happened.

He goes to the hatch opposite my own. “This is Cara Yancey’s section. She’s our materials scientist working on some cool things.”

The door slides open and reveals a woman in a blue jumpsuit with her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail hovering over a lab bench looking through a microscope.

She turns around and smiles at us. “You must be our new neighbor.”

Her lab is lined with small machines that resemble the large format 3D printer in my own lab. Racks of cylinders are stacked on top of each one.

“You’re admiring my molecular printers?” She drifts over and pats the front panel of one. “I can produce just about any chemical compound you can name and have my assemblers make something with it.”

Each one of these probably costs a million dollars. I count twenty of them.

“Well, I’m impressed. Can you do any food assembly with them?”

“You’ll have to ask Samantha about that. I tried to make filet mignon in one of these and it didn’t turn out so well.”

“We’re lucky the CDC didn’t shut us down,” says Attwell.

“Here, let me show you something.” Cara floats over to a bin and pulls out a small square of silky material and hands it to me.

The surface is extremely smooth. I give it a pull and the material resists. “What am I looking at?”

“Watch.” She takes the square from me and places it into a cylinder that leads to a clear plastic chamber.

She uses a pair of gloves to spray the cloth with a black paint-like substance. It just forms globules then drifts away.

“Stain proof?”

“Hold on.” She dumps the contents of a small bottle at the cloth, pelting it with a fine powder. “This is a moon dust analog.”

The dust bounces off the material and seems to try to avoid it when she whirls the cloth around the chamber.

She presses a button and a vacuum sucks all the dust away and the chamber is cleared except for the cloth. She loads that back into the cylinder and hands it to me.

I inspect the surface. “There’s nothing there.”

“Correct. As you probably know, lunar dust is so finely ground it provides a major health risk to space workers. The same for Martian perchlorate. This is completely particulate phobic.”

“We should build habitats and spacesuits out of that stuff.”

“We don’t need to. It’s a spray. When it wears down it turns purple so you know where to give it a touch up.”

“You’re brilliant,” I reply.

She shakes her head. “I didn’t invent the stuff. Some guys at CalTech did. I’m just the one up here who gets to play with all the toys.”

“That spray could save us billions of dollars on the lunar base and Martian exploratory missions,” says Attwell, doing his job defending the cost of this facility. “But Cara is being modest. She’s developed a space-silk material that’s an excellent insulator.”

“It’s a work in progress,” she replies. “You been to the plasma lab? That’s the cool stuff. That’s where Ben gets to play.”

“I’m saving that for last,” says Atwell.

We leave Cara to her work and float over to the second DARPA module.

Inside, a young man by the name of John Ling is hovering in front of a computer display, looking at frequency spectrums like the one I saw back at Penumbra.

Attwell introduces us and Ling’s face lights up when he hears my name.

“Wait, you’re the David Dixon?” he says excitedly and strips off his gloves to shake my hand.

“Yep.” I look around at all his equipment.

“This is an honor.”

Sometimes I get that. Sometimes.

“I have a million questions for you,” he says.

Please god, don’t be a Space Truther.

“I want to know everything about the lasers the Russians hit you with.”

“You probably know more than I do.”

“You’d be surprised at how little they tell us. Even me, a laser scientist working on top secret projects. You think it would help to know what the other guys are up to.”

Either Ling doesn’t know that something in his lab ended up on a Chinese satellite and shot a US bird, or he’s an incredible actor.

As he talks, I watch Attwell out of the corner of my eye. Ling seems oblivious to the effect this topic is having on his boss.

Interesting. I’m not sure what to make of that, but clearly Attwell is more worried than I suspected.

“I’ll see if I can get someone to forward you the information about what happened. All I know is they almost poked a hole in my ship and nearly blinded me.”

“Yeah, but through your heat shield. And the optics to target you through the atmosphere with the other had to be incredible.”

I decide to distract him from this conversation. I point to a box at the back of the module. “What’s that?” I ask.

Inside the glass door there’s another chamber the size of a microwave.

“Oh that? This is where we grow laser crystals. Do you know anything about how that works?”

“No…enlighten me.”