Orbital

Forty Confidence Man

“Murder you?” I blurt the words out so quickly there’s no way that it can be an act.

From the look on her face I can see that I totally caught her off guard. If she was waiting to see how I tried to dance around that revelation, my genuine shock must have come as a surprise.

“Who tried to kill you?” I ask.

“That’s why I assume you’re here — to find out.”

“Lady, you got the wrong guy. While I’d be happy to help you find out who the culprit is, I can promise you this is the first I heard of it.”

She stares at me for a moment, hovering in mid-air. A lock of dark hair falls in front of her face, hitting one of her impressive cheekbones. She flicks it away in an almost nervous tic kind of manner and for a fleeting second I see a vulnerability in her eyes that wasn’t there before.

Wait…she wants me to be here, or rather, the super slick space spy she was trying to get me to cop to being. Where Attwell and Tamara clearly were made uneasy by my presence, Samantha was hoping that I am that guy — or doing an incredible job of acting like it.

“Tell me what happened?”

“It’s not important. I just thought…never mind. It was stupid.”

“It doesn’t sound like it.”

She takes the box from her pocket and tosses it towards me. I feign disinterest and push it away. “Samantha, what are you talking about?”

She lets out a sigh. “Four months ago we had a service ship dock at the station. I was due to go to Earth for two weeks, but there was a problem with one of my experiments and I had to postpone. When the ship returned to Earth…”

I finish her sentence. “It burned up on reentry.”

“So you know?”

“I read about it. I didn’t know that it was supposed to carry passengers.”

“It’s human-rated because of the equipment it has to carry. We’ve used it a few times. Anyway, this one didn’t make it.”

“That must have been terrifying.”

“You have no idea. What happened next was almost as bad.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. There was a perfunctory FAA investigation that’s still in progress. But nothing else. The anticipated cause was mechanical failure, even though this model has flown close to 500 missions without so much as a hiccup.”

“Space travel ain’t like aviation, yet.”

She gives me a withering gaze. “How would you feel if you almost died on reentry?”

“Is this a serious question for me?”

“Right. Right. I forgot this is the indestructible David Dixon.”

“As you saw today I’m quite destructible.”

“Anyway, besides the emotional trauma of missing the flight that didn’t make it, is the frustration of trying to find out what happened. I sent requests, filed reports, I did everything I could to find out what happened. Maybe that’s the scientist part of my brain trying to find a rational explanation.”

“These things take time.”

“Yes, but you didn’t let me finish. I finally got a copy of an internal FAA preliminary report, something that wasn’t supposed to be forwarded to me. It said to withhold the final assessment from public review. The sender address was someone working for the CIA. What the hell is the CIA doing telling the FAA to obstruct an investigation unless they suspected sabotage?

“I kept waiting for them to send someone here to look into what happened. And waiting. Finally you show up. Given your background with the Korolev, I figure you must be some kind of special government operative.”

“There’s nothing special about me.”

“That’s the second time you’ve deflected a direct inquiry into your purpose here with a non-response. Which makes me think you have something to hide but aren’t fully committed to lying about it.”

Jesus, this woman is too smart for me to keep up.

“So, can you tell me why someone would want me killed?” she asks.

And she’s paranoid… The woman thinks what happened to the ship was about her.

“I have no idea why anybody would want to kill you. And nobody sent me here to find out why. I’m sorry. I can ask some of the people I know to ask around, but I don’t know anything about that.”

She wraps her arms around her body and bites her lip. If this is an act, it’s amazing.

“You don’t understand what it’s like being up here, thinking someone close to you tried to kill you. And too afraid to go back to Earth.”

“Wait? You haven’t gone back since then?”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “And let them kill me? I keep extending my contract promising my employers I’ve got something really big I’m working on.”

Her body language, her vulnerability, her…um, appeal, all of it makes me want to take her in my arms and tell her that it’s going to be okay — that whoever destroyed the ship wasn’t out to get her. But doing that would tell her that I’m here because of the real reason the ship was destroyed.

And if she’s playing me, that would tell her everything she needs to know.

I take her into my arms anyway. She responds by wrapping hers around me and burying her head in my chest.

It’s an awkward hug between two strangers. For her at least, I’m someone she’s seen in the news she thinks of as some kind of heroic person.

“You’re the first person up here that I can at least trust is not trying to kill me,” she says into my shoulder.