Orbital

Forty-Three Mission Control

After spending another hour in the Tiki module, doing my best to act like a care free guy while steering clear of any more of Calvo’s cocktails, I head for the hatch.

As I near the exit, Samantha grabs me by the elbow. “Where are you heading off to?”

“I’m going to take a microscope to my shoe and see where it went wrong.”

“Don’t forget to ask your friend about the little box thing.”

“Yeah. I’ll make some scans and send them down.”

“Think we should show it to Tamara?”

Samantha seems like she’s not sure who to trust. This could be an act, but it’s best if I proceed as if I believe she’s being sincere.

“Probably. But let’s see if I can get an answer from somebody first. Just in case.” I don’t spell out what that case may be, but my implication is that we don’t even know if we can trust Tamara.

“Good point. Hey, if you’re going to be around later, some of us are going up to the observation bubble.”

“Is that where the after party is?”

“If you think this is the party, you have another thing coming.”

“I’ll try to stop by.” I grab a rail to push off towards the exit, then stop. “Hey, thanks for helping me out today.”

“Don’t mention it. I could see in your eyes out there for a moment you weren’t sure if I was going to save your ass.”

“Did it show?”

“Don’t worry. If I wanted you dead, you’d never see me coming.”

“Thanks Dr. Turco.”

“Anytime.”

I head back to my lab, shut the hatch then call down to Earth. I get Admiral Jessup and Captain Baylor on the screen.

“How did the search go?” asks Jessup.

“Other than a minor hiccup, it went well.”

“Could you define ‘hiccup’ for us,” Baylor replies.

“My space shoe had a malfunction and my foot swelled to cartoon proportions. But it’s fine now.” I quickly change the topic from my incompetence, “The important thing is I found this.”

I take the box from my pocket and let it float in front of the camera.

“Is that the fingerprint sensor jammer?” asks Baylor.

“I believe so.” I place it inside a scanner. “I’m going to send you some images. Maybe someone down there can give us an idea of where it came from.”

Green laser light begins to pass over the box inside the machine as thermal and millimeter radar sensors probe the interior.

“Getting it now,” replies Baylor. “Not a very sophisticated device.”

“No. It just needs to know the frequency of the security system. The clever part is the surface which is actually a solar panel. It almost matched the color of the station.”

“Almost? You’d think they wouldn’t have trouble getting that exactly right.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure what this kind of temperature extreme and direct sunlight does to pigment. If it hadn’t been for the discoloration, I never would have found it. And speaking of which, the biologist, Samantha Turco, she may have caught me prying the thing loose and was convinced I was a some kind of undercover investigator looking into the automated vehicle explosion.”

“What did you tell her?” asks Jessup.

“I denied everything. She seemed pretty distraught by the incident. She said that she was originally going to go back to Earth on the vehicle. After it blew up she’s been worried that someone was out to get her and hasn’t returned to Earth.”

“Did she give a reason for why somebody would want to kill here?”

“Not really. It seemed more like shock than some kind of belief arrived at from reason. Was she the one that was supposed to go down?”

“Yes. Although that shouldn’t discount her as a suspect. In fact, it makes her even more suspicious.”

“I can understand that.”

“What’s your personal opinion of her?”

For a split second I’m about to say that I find her attractive, but realize he means if I trust her or not.

“I don’t know what to make of her. She’s been coming on very strong to me.”

“Hitting on you?” Baylor raises an eyebrow. “You’ve barely been there a day.”

“Time moves fast in space.”

“How have you responded to this?” asks Jessup.

“Visibly flattered, but I just told another researcher that I had a complicated situation back on Earth.”

“And you think this will throw Turco off the hunt?” Baylor asks skeptically.

“It’ll at least give me an excuse to play hard to get, other than the fact that I’m on a secret government mission and can’t mix business with pleasure.”

“I never forbade that,” says Jessup. “But I trust you to use your own judgement.”

“I trust that I have very poor judgement in these matters.”

“If Turco is the spy, that could be very dangerous.”

“I’ve thought about that.” A lot. “And if she’s not, it’s an unnecessary distraction. I plan to keep playing intrigued, yet coy.”

“You know very little about women,” says Baylor.

“I wouldn’t disagree with that.”

“What’s your next step?” asks Jessup.

“Now that we have evidence of tampering, I want to figure out how they got the sample. I’m going to ask Dr. Ling to show me a little bit more of his lab while Attwell isn’t around. Although the jammer suggests how someone could trip the DARPA folks into using the keypad, it still doesn’t tell me precisely how they got the crystal.

“Was it stolen outright from the trash? Replaced? I’m hoping I can get Ling to tell me more about their procedures. I’m afraid with Attwell nearby I’ll get an earful about what they’re supposed to do, but not their actual procedures.

“Hopefully knowing what those are will indicate who was in the best position to snatch the crystal.”

“Very good,” says Jessup. “The sooner I can get you off the station, the better.”

“What’s the time crunch?”

“The Chinese have changed the orbit of the CS satellite. They’re either trying to bring it into a reentry burn, or they’re going to try to boost it higher. If that’s the case, and they find out they’re missing an astronaut, they might deduce that we’re trying to find the source of the stolen crystal, which would put you in a dangerous situation.”

I knew my days of after work Mai Tais and offers of attachment-free zero-g sex were numbered.