Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (7 page)

Automatically I said, “Or her.”

“Huh?”

“Or over
her
head.”

He looked at me oddly. “Why did you say that?”

I’d said it because
I
needed the suit, but I answered, “We have men
and
women in space, Cory.”

“We do. That’s one advantage of this suit type, after all. It handles wide hips and narrow waists without any trouble.” He cleared his throat and added, “But I was wondering if you’d heard about the testicle issue.”

I blushed. “Excuse me?” For a second I wondered if he was turning into my Central Park stalker.

“I told you about the suit prototype that had the waist flange, right?”

I nodded.

“While it wasn’t giving us good pressures around the waist, we thought it was giving us consistent enough pressure everywhere else on the life model to do some human-comfort trials. First we tried the upper body by itself and then we tried the lower body by itself, on one of my grad students.

“Turns out the testicles don’t like thirty kilopascals of pressure, no matter how uniform.” He winced. “I tried it, too. We semisolved the pinching with variations on an athletic cup and some gel padding, but it wasn’t perfect. But when we had some undergrad females try the lower half, they didn’t need any padding or structural support. They reported no discomfort.”

I raised my eyebrows. It wasn’t something I’d considered before. “The advantage of internal reproductive organs, I guess. What about breasts?”

He shook his head. “Not a problem, even with the one woman who wore a D cup. She wore an athletic bra and we went slow on the tensioning, making sure the pressure was uniform with no pinched flesh. She said it was the best support she’d ever had. Of course we didn’t have it on that long.”

“Why?”

“Breathing. We didn’t have the suit in a vacuum and they weren’t breathing pressurized air, so the suit squeezes in on the lungs. It’s possible, but it’s tiring. Once we solve the closure issues, we can do extended-period comfort tests by pressurizing the helmet above ambient.”

I looked down the neck. “How do you resize the mannequin in this guy? You tried the suit with a large range of body sizes, right?” I was pretty sure that was in his paper.

He nodded. “The life-model sensor is modular.” He tapped the protruding neck. “The neck is part of the central torso which goes all the way down to the crotch, then there’s a right and left torso. The arms and legs are all one piece each. Each piece fits through the neck flange. We simulated several different body types, achieving thirty kilopascals from six foot four, two hundred and twenty pounds, all the way down to five foot even, ninety-five pounds.”

I nodded. I was five three, myself.

I looked around the lab, “Where are your other life-model parts?”

“That was some of the equipment in my old lab.”

“Oh. How did that work out?”

“I took
all
your advice. I sent the picture to the campus police, to university legal,
and
to Hannum.” Cory grinned. “I don’t think the legal department is happy with Dr. Hannum. The faculty senate is rather upset, too, about my termination midsemester. I’ve agreed not to sue and they are paying my next two months’ salary.
And
, not only did they unseal the lab, they paid for shipping my equipment out here.”

“Poor Dr. Hannum.”

“Well, the bastard has tenure, so it’s not like he’ll get fired, but I suspect they might stick him with the department chairmanship an extra year or two.”

“An
extra
year? That’s a punishment?”

“You’ll understand later, when you start teaching in grad school.”

It was my turn to stare. That was not exactly a direction I’d ever seen my life going. Flattering, though. I don’t think he realized how young I was.

I turned back to the suit. “If you could get a human into
this
suit would it protect him in a vacuum? Do you have a working helmet?”

“I have a helmet. Weren’t you listening, though? I’d have to chop a person up to get him inside. No grown human I’ve ever seen will fit through this flange. Maybe some three-year-olds.”

I nodded. “I understand, but let’s just say
if
? Could it go into space?”

He shrugged. “Well, at least to vacuum testing. That’s why this is so frustrating.” He brought his index finger to his thumb until they were almost touching. “We’re
that
close.”

I nodded slowly.

I knew a human who could get into that suit.

I knew three of them.

FOUR

Davy: You don’t drop your weapon

Davy thought of himself as a timid person.

He was a person who could jump away at the slightest confrontation and often did. He still thought of himself as the young teenager cringing in his bedroom when his alcoholic father came home.

He was not feeling timid, now, though. He suspected it had to do with losing his mother to violence. He wasn’t willing to lose anyone else. The “doctor” from the nursing facility had pointed a gun at his mother-in-law and a Taser at his wife.

Davy didn’t drop him fifty feet into the water of the pit—something he had been doing for thirty years. He wanted access to the man’s cell-phone history and, if he had any documents, Davy didn’t want to risk them becoming illegible.

But he did drop him into the pit—from fifteen feet above the island, into a stand of thorny mesquite scrub. The man pitched forward, flailing his arms to try and get his feet under him before he hit, but he only partially succeeded, slamming down through the brush. His breath left him with a heavy grunt and the Taser flew fifteen feet. He still clutched the automatic, though.

Davy snatched the Taser and jumped to the rim above.

The man wasn’t dead. Davy could see his arms were twitching but suspected he hadn’t managed to inhale yet. He was considering going back down to jump-start the man’s breathing when he heard a wheezing intake echo off the walls of the pit. After several more wheezing breaths, the man managed to sit upright, pulling away from the thorns that snagged his jacket. He started to stand, but his left leg gave way when he tried to put weight on it.

His next attempt went better, using his arms and good leg, he staggered upright. After a few more labored breaths he limped out of the brush to a stretch of bare sand near the water’s edge. He carried the gun pointed at the sky, one hand bracing the other, his elbows pulled tight into his sides. His head swiveled back and forth, looking over the island, then the walls of the pit, and then finally up toward the rim and the blue sky.

Davy aimed the Taser before jumping, appearing six feet behind him, his hand already squeezing the trigger. Two red laser-aiming dots appeared on the man’s back and then the Taser bucked. Two wires shot out, sticking into the man’s jacket four inches apart. His back arched and his arms spasmed. His legs didn’t collapse as much as kick out, and he landed heavily on his back. Again, his breath left him.

Davy took the gun and two spare ammo clips, the wallet, the phone, and three spare Taser cartridges from the man’s rear pocket. He found a pair of handcuffs tucked in the man’s belt and there was a capped hypodermic in the breast pocket of his jacket.

Davy jumped away to the Yukon, to the cabin, and set his looted material on the kitchen table. He popped the battery out of the phone. He’d never been able to get a GPS receiver to work in the cabin—metal roof—but there was no point in taking chances.

The gun felt odd, unbalanced. He hit the clip release, but nothing came out. He turned it over and looked up the frame. There was no magazine in the weapon. He worked the slide in case there was a round in the chamber, but no round ejected. He pointed at the exterior log wall and pulled the trigger. Click.

He wanted to go through everything, but first things first. He left it all on the kitchen table.

When Davy returned to the pit he carried a broad-spectrum radio-frequency detector with an antenna probe at the end of a cable. He also had a handheld metal detector hanging from a belt loop.

The man was breathing again, but even more labored than after his drop. His eyes were half open, but Davy didn’t think he had control of his muscles yet. Still, he stood well back while he swept with the radio-frequency wand.

No transmitting bugs. No transmitting trackers.

Davy was almost disappointed.

He used the metal detector, paying special attention to the man’s upper chest. Nothing.

He was
not
disappointed about that. The last thing he wanted to see was another exploding upper chest.

Sweeping lower, he got a strong beep from the man’s buckle and nothing else. Davy snaked the belt out of the man’s pants, slapping away the man’s hand as he weakly tried to block Davy.

Davy stepped away. The belt buckle was heavy stainless steel and when he fingered it, it slid out of a pocket in the belt revealing a short, double-edged knife blade.

There was something odd about the snap on the man’s slacks. Davy twisted it and it came away. He turned it over and saw a concealed push-out, plastic handcuff key.

He jumped away, leaving the man on the sand.

The wallet had eighty dollars in cash, a driver’s license and credit cards for Mortimer S. Hunter from Maclean, Virginia. There was also a gym membership, a frequent-diner card from a sushi restaurant, and a worn picture of a girl, perhaps twelve. The town sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it. He took pictures of the ID and other cards, then put them back in the wallet.

*   *   *

He jumped back to Wichita, to a small, airless self-storage unit next door to Samantha’s retirement village. A massive knee-high deep-cycle battery sat on the concrete floor. Welding-gauge wire ran from screw terminals to a DC-to-AC inverter. The power adaptor of a cheap netbook computer was plugged into the inverter. The netbook sat on a TV tray in front of a green plastic patio chair.

The camera Davy had installed in Samantha’s room looked like the wall-plug transformer end of a phone charger and, in fact, was doing a good job of charging Samantha’s cell phone, but it had a tiny wide-angle lens that looked like a screw hole. It also connected to the nursing facility’s WiFi network, as did Davy’s netbook in the storage locker.

Davy hit the shift key and the blank screen came alive, showing Samantha’s room from the vicinity of the room’s built-in vanity. Samantha was reading from her tablet, which was held above her by a gooseneck floor stand. Her arm was propped with pillows so she could change pages with just the flick of a finger. He turned up the volume on the netbook and heard the muted sound of a television from a neighboring room.

He nodded. He didn’t think they would take her. Besides the logistics of moving a post-surgical bedridden patient, if Millie or Davy didn’t know where she was, then Samantha couldn’t be used for bait.

The netbook was recording the camera feed in space-saving fifteen-frames-per-second video. Davy checked the remaining room on the flash drive. He could store months at this rate. The battery would last weeks.

He switched to the web browser and searched for Maclean, Virginia, then sat back, surprised at the results. Sure, they
called
it Langley, but the actual address was 1000 Colonial Farm Road, Maclean, Virginia: Central Intelligence Agency.

Davy cleared the search from the browser history, reselected the monitor window, and jumped back to the Yukon.

*   *   *

When he replaced the battery and powered it on, Mr. Mortimer Hunter’s phone asked for a key code. Davy shrugged, pulled the battery again, and put both the battery and phone in his pocket.

It had rained recently in Singapore’s Sim Lim Square. The pavement was wet, but the sun was barely above the horizon and it hadn’t turned steamy yet. The man Davy was looking for had already opened his kiosk, the International Phone Emporium.

“
Ni hao a
, Lucas?”

Lucas was taller than Davy, unlike most of the Singapore Chinese, but he tended to hunch over, to bring his eyes level with most of his customers. “Ah, me very well, one.”

Davy smiled. “I have this phone. I need to get the logs, the pictures, the contacts, and the texts off of it.” He handed the phone and battery to Lucas.

“Huh.
Wah lau!
So crap one! Five minutes. You want on a different phone or just thumb drive?”

“Thumb drive, please. Uh, I don’t have the security code.”

Lucas grinned. “This one can do
lah
.”

Davy nodded. “Thought so.”

“Wait
lah
.”

“Sure.”

While Lucas did his thing at the back of the kiosk with cables and a laptop, Davy stared at the phone displays that ranged from simple cordless phones for landlines, to cell phones of every make and model, up to satellite communications systems used at sea or other places without cell service.

Lucas came back and said, “What else you want or not?”

“Nothing else. Hundred dollar okay?”

“Singapore or U.S.?”

“U.S. dollar.”

Lucas smiled. “Very okay.”

Davy traded the cash for the phone, battery, and thumb drive, and shook Lucas’s hand.

*   *   *

Back in the pit the “doctor” was up again, limping gingerly around the edge of the island. Davy thought his limp was less pronounced and, considering that the man hadn’t
really
pointed a loaded weapon at his mother-in-law, Davy was glad he hadn’t dropped him from any higher.

He jumped down to the island, thirty feet behind the man.

“Is it your ankle or your knee?”

The man jerked around at Davy’s voice and dropped to one knee as his leg gave way again.

Davy winced. He felt a little guilty but he was pretty sure the man
had
intended to use the Taser on Millie. Then there was the knife. He wasn’t sure what
that
was about.

“Ankle,” said the man.

“I wouldn’t have used the Taser if I’d known the gun was empty.”

The man shrugged. “You didn’t know that until after you got it, right? So maybe I could have threatened you with it.”