The Fall Read Free

of a fourth drink while glancing at her short fingernails, painted black to match her lipstick, before shifting her gaze between Jack’s vitals, the descent profile display, and the suit’s hundreds of internal monitors—telemetry that was broadcast through two passing satellites and one in geosynchronous orbit right above the jump as backup. In addition, the pod’s final task was to shoot off in a parallel descent path to Jack’s while providing them with high-resolution imagery for the first few minutes of the jump, before it burned up on reentry at around mile thirty. Then the cameras aboard a dozen high-altitude balloons parked along his planned route would pick up his epic fall right up to his final chute deployment, when ground cameras and several spotting helicopters would be waiting to record the final descent.
    Everyone in that room—with the exception of Hastings and his annoying crew—had a specific task to handle, from managing the capsule’s trajectory and tracking satellites, to the incoming weather system, the high-altitude balloons, distance to all other orbiting objects, and even working real-time with central Florida’s air traffic controllers to create a twenty-mile-wide temporary flight restriction around Jack’s planned descent path, also known as the “pipe.”
    On top of all that, the Air Force had a dozen fighter jets hauling high-frequency transmitters meant to keep all birds away from the pipe. The stakes were high, and the last thing NASA and the Pentagon needed was for Jack to hit a chunk of space debris or a damned seagull on his way down. But even the finest rocket-scientist minds couldn’t anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong with a project of this complexity, and that very, very small—but still very, very real—probability of something going wrong kept Angela’s heart rate high and her throat dry.
    Come home to me, Jack, she thought, feeling immense pressure building up in her chest, just to realize she had stopped breathing.
    Slowly inhaling through her nostrils and exhaling through her mouth, Angela took a sip of her drink and tried to control her growing heart rate, for a moment feeling ashamed that Jack’s was actually lower than hers. But then again, Jack had always been in superb physical shape, which over the years meant that Angela also got in shape to keep up with him, from long runs, mountain climbing, and ocean kayaking to becoming his official self-defense training partner at home, an activity that typically ended in the bedroom. In return, Angela taught Jack to ride Triumph motorcycles and even got him to get a tattoo to match hers.
    She grinned, glancing at the burning Triumph Bonneville T140 flanked by American and British flags on her right forearm, half covered by her lab coat.
    The knowledge that Jack had one just like it up there somehow helped her steady her breathing.
    You are some smooth operator, she thought, amazed that he could calm her down even from outer space.
    But just as Jack could calm her down, he could also really push her buttons, bringing out the worst in her.
    Their relationship hadn’t been easy the past two years, with Jack signing up for every high-adrenaline military mission while she developed space suits for NASA.
    What happened to us? she pondered as the countdown sequence ticked down in the upper left corner of her display. The glimmer in his brown eyes last night, as they shared homemade pasta while reviewing the various phases of his descent and last-minute adjustments to his space suit, had reawakened long-dormant feelings in Angela.
    But you came along, you little fucker, she thought, glaring at Claudette in one of the large screens at the front of the room, remembering the cell phone vibrating on the dinner table, Pete informing them that an incoming weather system had moved up the jump. A car was already on the way to get them both to the Cape.
    Angela sighed,