Orbital

Forty-Four Protocol

I’m in the hotel kitchen pouring myself a cup of coffee when I see Attwell enter and put a dinner tray into the oven. He looks half asleep.

“Heading to the lab?” I ask.

He wipes at his eyes. “No. I’ve been there all night trying to solve a glitch. I’m about to crash.”

Which means I have a really good chance of getting Ling by himself. “Oh. Well, good night.” I start for the door.

“Where are you headed?”

“I was going to the observation bubble.”

“With that?” He points to my coffee mug.

I stare at it for a moment, thinking that he just saw through my lie, then realize I can’t take this out of the artificial gravity wheel and expect it to stay in the mug.

“Oh, that. I’m still adjusting.”

“I tried brushing my teeth in the zero-g lavatory once,” he explains. “I ended up with a meter long line of toothpaste when I absentmindedly squeezed the tube. Quite fun to play with, actually. It gave me a few ideas. Chief among them was to never do that again.”

“Good point. I guess I should finish this.” I start to gulp down the coffee.

“Or get Turco to give you one of her coffee bulbs.” He pauses, then adds, “If she hasn’t already.”

“I haven’t seen those,” I reply as I put my empty mug into the washing machine.

It’s like the world’s smallest town up here. Everybody is into everybody else’s business like there’s nothing else going on in the world.

I guess technically, this is its own world. But still.

I’m glad I didn’t even hint to being an operative to Tamara or anyone else. I’m sure it would be all over the station by now. And whoever is the one that’s working for the Chinese would have an advantage over me that could cost me my life.

All the more reason to take Jessup’s advice to find out what I can then get the hell off this crazy station.

Ling greets me at the door of his hatch with confusion then a smile when he remembers who the hell I am. He’d been locked up inside of here since I last saw him.

I get the impression that Attwell basically leaves the young man alone with his work.

“Mr. Dixon,” says Ling as he pulls the hatch open slightly. “What’s going on?”

“You got a second?” I look over my shoulder a little dramatically. I want him to invite me inside in case Attwell comes back through this section.

“Yeah. Everything okay?”

“I just have a confidential question.”

He pulls the hatch open and lets me inside. “Is it about my work?”

“What? You’re doing force fields and stuff?”

“No. That’s Dr. Attwell. I do lasers.”

“Right. Right. Impressive stuff. Well, maybe you can help me out with this question anyway.”

I made up the lie once I realized I needed to question him alone without him realizing he was being questioned.

“Sure?” He pulls himself over to his computer workstation and wraps a belt around his waist then takes up a lotus position in mid-air.

“Do you always sit like that?”

“I’ve been trying different yoga positions to see if they help deal with muscle loss in zero-g.”

“Really? Any success?”

“Possibly. I’ll need a control group. I might write a paper, but don’t tell Dr. Warren that.”

“Your secret is safe with me. Anyway, my question is about secrets. Some of the stuff I’m working on is very proprietary. Not all of it works. Anything useful I’m supposed to send back down to Earth. But I’m not quite sure what I should do with any prototypes that don’t cut it. Back on Earth I’d just toss them into a big shredder. I don’t have one of those up here.”

“Are you worried about someone on the station stealing something?” asks Ling.

“Me? No. But if a competitor came out with something similar, I need to show my employers that I handled all the prototypes properly and didn’t let them fall into someone else’s hands.”

“I see. I’m surprised they didn’t have a procedure for this.”

“They’re still figuring things out. I know the station sends its trash back down to Earth. Is it safe to just include my failed materials with that? Do you know if it’s kept securely?”

“I wouldn’t trust it. You don’t know who is processing that on the other end. How much material are you talking about?”

I hold my hands out the same distance as the crystal on the CS. “About that. Shoes, gloves, other tools.”

“Hmm. That might fit inside a sample return box.”

“What’s that?”

Ling goes over to a cabinet and pulls out a metal box the size of a small wastebasket. “This is what we use. It’s insulated for handling reentry.” He points to the chamber at the end of the module. “Everything that comes out of there ends up in one of these.”

“Everything? Even things that broke?”

“Yes. I’m not sure what you know about crystals, but even the basic chemical composition is proprietary information. In our case, heavily classified.”

“Really? So you put everything inside one of those?”

“Yes. All our samples, good or bad, get placed in here.” He closes the lid and points to connector port. “That’s how it’s opened. It’s not the most complicated thing to get around, I’m sure, but it ensures that from the moment it leaves this lab to when it gets to where it needs to go on Earth that nobody is able to take a peek without us knowing.”

Unless it mysteriously blows up in orbit…

“Where do you get those?”

“DARPA supplies them. They sent up two-dozen. I’ve used about half.”

“Two dozen?” I look around his lab.

“We keep them in the storage module.”

“Storage module?”

“Didn’t Tamara show you that section on your tour? Oh, I guess AstroFirma doesn’t rent one of those.”