The damned thing thrashed past us like a hypersonic bat out of hell. I looked down at the electron gun’s gauges. Everything read zero. We had used up all the energy in the power pack.
“Well, either it works or it doesn’t,” Sam said. All of a sudden he sounded tired.
I nodded inside my helmet. I felt it too: exhausted, totally drained. Just like the electron gun; we had given it everything we had. Now we had nothing left. We had done everything we could do. Now it was up to the laws of physics.
“We’ll be back at the station in an hour,” Sam said. “We’ll know then.”
We knew before then. Our helmet earphones erupted a few minutes later with cheers and yells, even some whistles. By the time we had completed our orbit and saw the station again, the shuttle was already re-docked. Freedom looked very pretty hanging up there against the black sky. Gleaming in the sunlight. Unscathed. So all we had to worry about was the bends.
“Was it very painful?” Jade asked.
Johansen gave her a small shrug. “Kind of like passing kidney stones for sixteen or seventeen hours. From every pore of your body.”
She shuddered.
“We came out of it okay,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to go through it again.”
“You saved the station. You became heroes.”
We saved the station—Johansen agreed—but we didn’t become heroes. The government didn’t want to acknowledge that there had been any danger to Freedom, and Rockledge sure as hell didn’t want the public to know that their Nerf ball had almost wrecked the station.
Everybody involved had to sign a secrecy agreement. That was Ed Zane’s idea. To give the guy credit, though, it was also his idea to force Rockledge to pay a cool ten million bucks for the cost of saving the station from their runaway Nerf ball. Rockledge ponied up without even asking their lawyers, and Zane saw to it that the money was split among the people who had been endangered—which included himself, of course.
Each of us walked away with about five hundred thousand dollars, although it wasn’t tax-free. The government called it a hazardous duty bonus. It was a bribe, to keep us from leaking the story to the media.
Everybody agreed to keep quiet—except Sam, of course.
The medics took us out of the airlock, once we stopped screaming from the pain, and hustled us down to a government hospital on Guam. Landed the blessed shuttle right there on the island, on the three-mile-long strip they had built as an emergency landing field for the shuttle. They had to fly a 747 over to Guam to carry the orbiter back to Edwards Space Base. I think they got Rockledge to pay for that, too.
Anyway, they put Sam and me in a semiprivate room. For observation and tests, they said. I figured they wouldn’t let either one of us out until Sam signed the secrecy agreement.
“Five hundred thousand bucks, Sam,” I needled him from my bed. “I could pay a lot of my bills with that.”
He turned toward me, frowning. “There’s more than money involved here, Mutt. A lot more.”
I shrugged and took a nap. I wouldn’t sign their secrecy agreement unless Sam did, of course. So there was nothing for me to do but wait.
Zane visited us. Sam yelled at him about kidnapping and civil rights. Zane scuttled out of the room. A couple of other government types visited us. Sam yelled even louder, especially when he heard that one of them was from the Justice Department in Washington.
I was starting to get worried. Maybe Sam was carrying things too far. They could keep us on ice forever in a place like Guam. They wouldn’t let us call anybody; we were being held incommunicado. I wondered what Bonnie Jo was doing, whether she was worried about us. About me.
And just like that, she showed up. Like sunshine breaking through the clouds she breezed into our hospital room the third day we were there, dressed in a terrific pair of sand-colored slacks and a bright orange blouse. And a briefcase.
She waltzed up between the beds and gave us each a peck on the cheek.
“Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” she said. “The agency wouldn’t answer any questions about you until my Uncle Ralph issued a writ.”
“Your Uncle Ralph?” Sam and I asked in unison.
“Justice Burdette,” she said, sounding a little surprised that we didn’t recognize the name. “The Supreme Court. In Washington.”
“Oh,” said Sam.”That Uncle Ralph.”
Bonnie Jo pulled up a chair between our beds, angling it to face Sam more than me. She placed her slim briefcase neatly on the tiled floor at her feet.
“Sam, I want you to sign the secrecy agreement,” she said.
“Nope.”
“Don’t be stubborn, Sam. You know it wouldn’t be in the best interests of VCI to leak this story to the media.”
“Why not? We saved the friggin’ space station, didn’t we?”
“Sam—you have proved the feasibility of the magnetic bumper concept. In a few months the agency will give out a contract to run the facility. If you don’t sign the secrecy agreement they won’t give the contract to VCI. That’s all there is to it.”
“That’s illegal!” Sam shot upright in his bed. “You know that! We’ll sue the bastards! Call the news networks! Call…”
She reached out and put a finger on his lips, silencing him and making me feel rotten.
“Sam, the more fuss you make the less likely it is that the government will award you the contract. They can sit there with their annual budgets and wait until you go broke paying lawyers. Then where will you be?”
He grumbled under his breath.
Bonnie Jo took her finger away. “Besides, that’s not really what you want, is it? You want to operate the debris removal system, don’t you? You want to sell the Vanguard satellite to the Smithsonian, don’t you?”
He kind of nodded, like a kid being led to the right answer by a kindly teacher.
“And after that?”
“Remove defunct commsats from GEO. Retrieve the Eagle from Tranquility Base and sell it to the highest bidder.”
Bonnie Jo gave him a pleased smile. “All right, then,” she said, picking up the briefcase. She placed it on her lap, opened it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “You have some signing to do.”
“What about me?” I asked, kind of sore that she had ignored me.
Bonnie Jo peeled the top sheet from the pile and held it up in the air by one corner. “This one’s for Sam. It’s the secrecy agreement. There’s one for you, too, Spence. All the others have to be signed by the president of VCI.”
“Over my dead body,” Sam growled.
“Don’t tempt me,” Bonnie Jo answered sweetly. “Read them first. All of them. Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.”
Sam glared at her. I tried not to laugh and wound up sputtering. Sam looked at me and then he grinned, too, kind of self-consciously.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll read.”
He put the secrecy agreement on the bed to one side of him and started going through the others. As he finished each document, he handed it to me so I could read it, too.
The first was a sole-source contract from the agency to run the debris removal system for space station Freedom for five years. Not much of a profit margin, but government contracts never give a high percentage of profit. What they do is give you a steady income to keep your overhead paid. On the money from this contract Larry and Melinda could get married and take a honeymoon in Tasmania, if they wanted to.
The second document made my eyes go wide. I could actually feel them dilating, like camera lenses. It was a contract from Rockledge International for VCI to remove six of their defunct commsats from geosynchronous orbit. I paged through to the money numbers. More zeroes than I had seen since the last time I had read about the national debt!
When I looked up, Bonnie Jo was grinning smugly at me. “That’s D’Argent’s peace offering. You don’t blab about the Nerf ball incident and you can have the job of removing their dead commsats.”