Orbital

Fifty-Three Housecall

Through no small amount of pleading and begging, I convince Samantha to help me up to my lab. I basically had to threaten to try to make it there by going up the ladder by myself to get her to relent.

This time, I used the small elevator, more of a dumb waiter, to ascend into the zero-grav section.

While being weightless certainly has taken a lot of strain off my body, it’s making the swollen areas sting even more as fluid begins to build up in the distended tissue.

I pretend like everything is fine. I don’t want to give her a reason to get Dr. Warren to pull rank and send me back to the clinic.

Everything rides on me being able to talk my superiors down below out of sending me home. Once I’m off the station, the trail could grow cold and we might never know who was the spy and lose our best chance at catching Silverback — the double-agent that killed my friends.

I grab a handrail and attempt to pull myself through the central corridor. I end up making a weak gesture and letting out a groan that’s a little more audible than I intended.

Samantha, floating next to me in her tank top and yoga pants, shakes her head. “Pathetic.”

“Have I told you how becoming zero-gravity is on you?” I reply as a distraction.

“Try that line when you don’t look like a bad horror movie. Come on.” She grabs me by my waistband and helps guide me around the corner and into the secure section.

I use my thumb to get through the lock on the outer door. Samantha pushes me inside.

We come to a stop at my hatch. “I got it from here.”

“Why am I not convinced?”

“I’ll be fine.” I grab a handle and rotate my body upright, trying to look confident and full of vigor, hiding the fact that I would be sprawled on the floor if I tried this in gravity. “I’ve been conserving my energy and I’m feeling a lot better.”

“Bullshit. I’m calling you on the comm in twenty minutes. If you don’t respond I’m getting Tamara to break the door down with an axe.”

“She has a key.”

“Whatever. I’ll be up here if you need me.” Samantha floats back through the secure section and towards her lab.

I manage to get through my door and fastened into the seatbelt that keeps me in place in front of my workstation.

Besides the fact that there’s not much of a defined up or down orientation to weightless work environments, the other stand out feature is that you almost never see anything that resembles a seat. There’s not much point to providing cushions for your ass when it never touches them.

Locked into place, I use my chubby fingers to initiate a call with Space Ops.

Baylor’s face appears on the screen. “David, is that you?”

“Speaking. I’m in the lab using the secure connection.”

“Yes, I can tell. Hold on a second.”

She pulls back from her screen and calls out to Jessup and Laney. They lean into frame on either side.

“David? We’re not getting video from you,” says Laney.

“Hey, Menace! I know. Don’t worry about that. Listen, I need you guys to call off the shuttle you’re sending to pick me up.”

“Why would we do that?” replies Jessup. “According to AstroFirma, Dr. Warren says you’re in very serious condition. We’re also sending up a NASA specialist on vacuum exposure.”

“Warren is a quack. I’m fine. A little swelling, but that’s it. You can’t send me down now. We’re really close to cracking this.”

“You were almost killed by a micro-meteorite impact on the station,” says Baylor. “We’ve heard you experienced an excessive amount of vacuum exposure. Something about a surplus space suit that malfunctioned?”

“Technically speaking it was something I made out of duct tape. The important thing was that someone tried to kill me. There was no micro-meteorite incident. I was in a storage module belonging to DARPA checking the canisters they use to send samples back to Earth. I discovered they were two short. That’s when someone decided to eject me from the station.”

“Wait? Are you saying this was an attempt on your life?” asks Jessup.

“Absolutely.”

“And you expect us to leave you up there?”

“I’m close to catching this person. Real close. If you send me back down they’ll get away.”

“We can keep track of them.”

“Maybe. But the evidence will be gone. And if Silverback thinks they’re a liability, I don’t know how much longer they’d have to live. This is the closest we might ever come.”

“And we almost lost you.”

“Almost. They screwed up and tipped their hand. They knew if I realized canisters were missing that might lead me to them.”

“How?”

“I’m working on that. There had to have been some kind of switch made. Maybe the station records will show us who. We can start by looking up the cargo manifest on the ship that blew up. Our thief might have had a shipment of their own.”

“Working on it,” says Laney.

“David, you still haven’t given me a compelling reason to let you stay,” replies Jessup. “I don’t want to risk your life again.”

“They had their shot. They wanted to keep me from telling you what I just did. Going after me a second time would be stupid.”

“And what kind of condition are you in?”

“I’m fine.”

“Let us be the judge of that. Turn on the video monitor, David.”

I try to bluff him. “The camera isn’t working.”

“Then go to your bunk and call Washburn. If you don’t let us have a look at you, I’m going to call Dr. Warren myself and have you sedated and dragged back to Earth.”

“Fine.” I turn the camera on.

“Jesus Christ,” says Jessup. “No way. Why the hell aren’t you in the clinic right now?”

I catch my own image in a small screen at the corner of the display. It’s hideous.

Almost as disturbing is the reaction on all of their faces.

“Guys, relax. It’s just swelling. I feel fine.”

“Then why is blood trickling out of your nose?” Laney says a little shrilly.

I wipe a sleeve under my nostril. “This? It’s mostly mucous. Normal.”

“Bullshit,” says Jessup.

I’m hearing that word a lot today.

I need to take a different tactic. “Okay, so you send your NASA doc up here, what’s he going to say that Warren hasn’t already?”

“They can bring you back down.”

“Oh, so you want to put me in my present condition onboard a spacecraft that’ll pull at least three g’s on reentry and make me go through that? Did your specialist tell you what the current research is on vacuum trauma and high-speed reentry? Medically speaking, it’s probably best if I stay here.”

“So you’re a doctor now?”

“Warren is more than up to the job of treating me. The best course of action is for me to stay put.”

Jessup fixes me with an intense scowl. I can tell he’s thinking this over and realizes the urge to bring me back to Earth was more of a knee-jerk reaction than one made from a sound medical point of view.

“That still doesn’t help with the fact that you’re up there with a killer.”

“True. But I have a solution to that.”