Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “Copy that. We see you rolling right. We have you at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, Mach 9. Looking good. Just like barnstorming old Copernicus, huh.”

  “Like hell,” Lamb said dourly. He pulled back on the speed brake handle. That opened flaps on the vertical stabilizer at the back of the orbiter; Benacerraf could feel the increased drag. “Brake indicator shows a hundred percent. Initiating third roll.” He pulled the stick across to the right, and the orbiter tipped again.

  The coastline of America fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, impossibly quickly.

  Bill Angel said, “What a way to visit California.”

  Voices crackled on the air-to-ground loops of the PA.

  There was a ragged cheer from the press stand. The blackout had seemed to last for ever, but here was physical proof that the orbiter was back in the atmosphere, at least.

  Now four big rescue helicopters went flapping over the press stand. They were like metal buzzards, Hadamard thought.

  A couple of people had climbed out of the press stand and had tried to get over closer to the runway. A NASA car was patrolling back and forth, keeping them back.

  Hadamard began to calculate what the fallout would be, depending on how this damn thing worked out.

  There were a number of scenarios: the crew could survive, or not; the orbiter could survive, or not.

  If everything came through more or less intact there would be a lot of bullshit in the press about NASA’s incompetence, and Hadamard would be able to come down hard on whichever contractor had screwed up this time, and the whole thing would be forgotten in a couple of days.

  At the other end of the scale — if he was looking at another Challenger, here — Hadamard expected to be facing some kind of shutdown. There would be inquiries, both internal and external, forced on NASA by the White House and Congress. And Hadamard himself would be thoroughly fucked over in the process, he knew.

  But in between those extremes there were a whole range of other contingencies. If the crew walked away from this, then you were looking at an Apollo 13, not a Challenger. And that could give him a lot of leverage. Hadamard had always thought NASA threw away the bonus of Apollo 13’s world attention and PR, a real gift from the political gods if ever there was one.

  Hadamard wouldn’t waste a similar opportunity, if it was presented to him. He began to calculate, figuring which of his personal goals he might be able to advance on the back of the events here today.

  Someone pointed up towards the zenith.

  Squinting, Hadamard could make out a tiny white spark, trailing contrails. Chase planes closed in on it, streaking across the sky.

  “Flight, Egil. Number one APU is still online. But I can’t give you a prediction of how long for.”

  “All right. What else? Fido?”

  “We’re in good shape for a contingency landing, Flight. We’re well off the runway, but we’re flying down into a lake bed, after all…”

  “Inco?”

  “No problems, Flight.”

  Fahy allowed a seed of hope to germinate. Maybe she could get through this after all, without losing her ship.

  “Fido, Flight. You got a recommendation?”

  The Flight Dynamics Officer — FDO, Fido — had the role of recommending intact abort options. The controller — fat, young, sweating — turned to face Fahy across the FCR. “We ought to egress, Flight. As soon as possible; the orbiter has to hold steady during the egress maneuver, and if that last APU goes down that won’t be possible.”

  Egress.He meant, abandon the orbiter.

  Fahy suddenly felt faint, and her senses seemed to be fading out; she grabbed onto the edge of her workstation, as if holding onto reality.

  Egress.The crux of history. On this moment, on her decision now, she sensed, pivoted her own life, the destiny of the mission, maybe the future of the space program.

  “You’re sure about that, Fido?”

  “Flight, get them out of there.”

  At bottom, Fahy did not want to become the first Flight Director to lose an orbiter since 51-L, Challenger. But she knew Fido was right.

  Hope died.

  “Marcus. You may instruct the crew.”

  Emerging from the blindness of the blackout, Columbia was now able to use external sensors to confirm its state vector, its map of its position and trajectory.

  To Benacerraf, now that the alarms had stopped sounding off, Lamb and Angel seemed tense but calm. Suddenly, it was like the sims once more.

  …But now the capcom was saying: “Columbia, Houston. We, ah, we recommend you prepare for egress. Emergency egress.”

  Angel stared at Lamb.

  “Say again, Marcus.”

  “Recommend you prepare for egress. The status of your APUs—”

  Lamb said, “We’re bringing this bird home yet, Marcus.”

  “Tom, I’m instructed to remind you that an orbiter ditching is not survivable.”

  “And landing on the Moon without a fucking radar is not survivable either, and we did that,” Lamb said. “Ninety thousand feet. Speed brake back to sixty-five percent.”

  “Copy,” Angel said.

  “Tom,” the capcom said, “you must make a decision at sixty thousand. A decision on the egress. We’ve little confidence in that last power unit holding out through the landing. Tom? Do you copy that?”

  The deceleration mounted; Benacerraf was forced forward, against the straps of her harness.

  “God damn it,” Lamb growled. “Yeah, I copy, Marcus. But we ain’t at sixty thou yet. Fourth roll reversal.”

  For the last time, Columbia banked over. When the orbiter straightened up, Benacerraf could see Columbia was flying over the town of Bakersfield, the bleak landmark at the fringe of the Mojave.

  Almost home, Benacerraf thought. They were flying through the atmosphere of Earth. Egress — abandoning the orbiter now — seemed absurd.

  But the ground was approaching awfully quickly. And they were miles off track.

  Lamb checked his altitude. “Sixty thousand feet. God damn it all to hell. Bill, Paula, get down to the mid deck.”

  “Tom—”

  “Move it, Bill! You’ve got ninety seconds. I’ll configure the computer mode for egress, then follow you out. Do it, guys.”

  Angel stared at Lamb for maybe five seconds. Then he unclipped his harness and stood up, shakily.

  Benacerraf, her heart pounding, unfastened her lap belt. She had to lift her harness back over her head, and disconnect her oxygen tube from her thigh, and unhook the hose bringing her cooling water. She stood up, cautiously. She started to hunt for the egress cue card.

  Now the decision was made — now that Lamb, up there in the hot seat, had actually concurred — Fahy began to feel a little calmer.

  On the open loop, she said, “All right, everybody. Let’s keep things nice and tight, now. This is STS-143, not 51-L. And we’re still Black Gold Flight, remember. In a couple of minutes we should have our crew out of there. Let’s follow the book, and bring those guys home. Capcom, you want to start Tom on his checklist?”

  White said, “Rog, Flight.”

  “Guidance, DPS, let’s get that bail-out software mode loaded and running in the GPCs.”

  “Affirm, Flight.”

  “Fido, get a good hack on the trajectory. I want no mistakes during the egress…”

  As Columbia went subsonic, it hit Mach buffeting. The orbiter shuddered, like a car going over a gravel road, as the airflow over its wings adjusted.

  Leading the way, Benacerraf clambered through the narrow interdeck opening on the left of the cabin. Her legs felt shaky, microgravity-attenuated, but they held her up, despite the rattling of the orbiter.

  She scrambled down the ladder to the mid deck area. The four mission specialists — Chandran, de Wilde, Gamble and Reeve — were sitting in their orange pressure suits, strapped into their fold-away metal and canvas seats. They looked at her through their big bubble visors. There was only fear in their fa
ces, none of the forced banter she’d endured on the flight deck.

  Phil Gamble — an orbiter systems specialist, tall, slim, bald — had thrown up, Benacerraf saw; the vomit had splashed against the lower half of his visor, and was pooled inside his helmet, at his neck.

  The mid deck — brightly lit by fluorescent floods behind translucent ceiling panels — had been roomy living quarters during the flight. Now, with the return of gravity, it seemed cramped, awkward, crowded out by the airlock and the big avionics bays at the back, full of metal angles and places to bang her knees. She felt an odd stab of nostalgia, for the days she had spent safely cocooned here, on orbit.

  “Egress,” she said briskly. “Chandran, you’re the jump master.”

  Sanjai Chandran was sitting in the leftmost forward seat, in front of the big bulge of the airlock. He was around fifty but looked older; his lined face and grey moustache peered out at her, full of concern. He tried to smile. “Yeah. But I didn’t sign up for this.”

  “Who the hell did? Come on, Sanjai—”

  Chandran released his restraints. He reached down to the floor, lifted a cover and pulled a T-handle. Benacerraf heard a sharp pyrotechnic crack; a valve had blown to equalize air pressure. Then Chandran hauled on another T-handle set in the floor. More pyros exploded around the hinge of the big circular wall hatch. The noise was violent, startling, and for an instant the mid deck was filled with dense smoke. But then three small thrusters blew, pushing the severed hatch out and away from the orbiter.

  The hatchway became a hole, through which Benacerraf could see the sky. Wind noise forced its way into the crew compartment, drowning any other sound. The opened hatchway was like a wound, cut into the side of the cozy den of the mid deck.

  Suddenly, Benacerraf’s heart was racing. It was as if, cocooned in the warm, gentle comfort of the orbiter, she’d not accepted the reality of the obscure technical failures which had plagued the landing. But that hole in the wall was a violation, a rip in the universe.

  Chandran reached down, stiffly. He pulled a pin and worked a ratchet handle.

  A telescopic escape pole sprouted out of the ceiling over the hatch opening, forced out by spring tension. The steel pole snaked out of the hatch and bent backwards like a reed, forced back by the wind beyond the hull.

  Chandran pulled a lanyard assembly out of a magazine close to the hatch. This was a hook suspended from a Kevlar strap. Chandran wrapped the strap around the pole, and fixed the hook to his pressure suit.

  Holding the Kevlar strap in his right hand, he stepped up to the hatchway.

  At the last second he turned. His mouth was half-open, a spray of spittle over the inside of his visor.

  With awful slowness, he turned again. Clinging with both hands to the Kevlar strap, he stood on the rim of the hatchway. Then, ponderously, he let himself fall out.

  Benacerraf could see Chandran sliding down the bent pole. He was twisting in the sudden gale, his orange pressure suit flapping against his flesh. Thread stitching on the Kevlar strap tore, absorbing some of Chandran’s momentum. He slid off the end of the pole, and started to fall away from the hull. Benacerraf could see his parachute opening, like a slowly blossoming flower.

  For a moment, the egress seemed to have worked.

  But then a gust picked up Chandran, and he soared in the air, his limbs loose as a doll’s.

  He caromed into the black leading edge of the orbiter’s big port wing, against the toughest heatshield surface the orbiter carried. He fell over the wing’s upper surface, his parachute limp and trailing, and smashed into the big OMS engine pod at the rear of the orbiter.

  After that he fell out of Benacerraf’s sight.

  Sanjai Chandran — astrophysicist, father of two — was gone. It had taken just a second.

  Benacerraf felt her stomach turn over, and saliva pooled at the back of her throat.

  As the crew tried to bail out — tried to work through that dumb-ass tacked-on Shuttle egress system — Marcus White tried to focus on the job he’d volunteered for.

  …He remembered coming down to the surface of the Moon, with Tom Lamb at his side:

  He leaned forward in his spacesuit, against the restraints that held him standing in his place, trying to see. The LM went through its pitchover maneuver, and suddenly there was the Moon below him, a black and white panorama, as battered as a B-52 bombing range, the shadows long in the lunar morning. There was too much detail, almost a crowd of craters. Really, it was nothing like the sims, with their little cameras flying over plaster-of-paris mocked-up landscapes.

  But there was his target, the little collection of eroded craters they’d dubbed the Parking Lot, almost lost in that black and white sea of craters. “Hey, there it is,” he’d said. “Son of a gun, Tom. Right down the middle of the road…”

  The Moon’s surface had plummeted up to meet them; they were coming in like a bullet, and he’d tipped the LM back to slow it, and the eight-ball had tilted sharply…

  Shit, shit. Focus, you old asshole.

  It was Benacerraf’s turn.

  She took a fresh lanyard assembly from the magazine, hooked into her suit, and slid it over the pole. Then she stepped up to the rim of the hatch. She clung to a handhold there, facing the air, framed by metal.

  She could sense the wind, just inches away from her. The hull of the orbiter was still hot from the frictional heating of the entry, and she could feel its warmth, seeping through her boots. To her left, the wing and tail assembly were huge, blocky, black and white shapes.

  And, far below, astonishingly far, she could see the Mojave. It was a brown plain, gently curving like a shallow dome, crisscrossed by pale road surfaces, and the dry salt lakes shone like glass.

  Bill Angel grabbed her shoulder. “I know it’s hard,” he shouted.

  “But Sanjai knew the rules. You got to play the hand you’ve been dealt, Paula. Godspeed.”

  She turned and looked at him. His eyes were shining. This was. she realized, Bill’s apotheosis, what he lived for.

  She thought of Chandran, and felt disgust at such bullshit.

  She loosened her grip on the handhold—

  —she would never have the guts to do this, to follow Sanjai—

  —she leaned over the lip of the hatch, feeling the pole taking some of her weight—

  —and she pushed herself out of the hatch, kicking against its sill as hard as she could.

  She skimmed down the pole. She felt the brisk rip of the breakaway stitching. The hook, sliding roughly over the pole, made a noise like a roar. In a second she reached the pole’s end, and she fell away into the air.

  It was like slamming into a wall. The breath was knocked out of her. And there was nothing beneath her feet for four miles. There were sharp tugs at her back as her pilot and drogue chutes opened automatically. She felt herself being hauled sideways and upwards.

  She looked up.

  She was already dropping away from the orbiter. She’d fallen under the port wing, and the orbiter was a huge delta shape, hanging in the sky only a few yards above her, the big silica tiles on its underside scarred and scorched. Black smoke trailed from the fat OMS engine pods on the tail.

  Then it was gone, falling away into the huge air around her, trailing contrails. The white felt of its upper heatshield seemed to shine in the low morning sunlight.

  Her main chute opened above her, and she fell into her harness with an impact that jarred the wind out of her.

  She was no longer falling. She was just dangling here, and when she looked at her feet, she could see the thinly scattered towns of the Mojave rim, still miles below, obscured by mist. And there was the orbiter, a white delta shape, dropping like a stone, already beneath her. Skimming above the mist, it was the most vivid object in the world, receding rapidly.

  She looked up. She could see four more chutes, opening out in the air.

  Of Sanjai Chandran, of course, there was no sign.

  She felt a sudden warmth between her leg
s, as her bladder released.

  Gently, Lamb worked his pedals, and the control stick. He felt the crippled orbiter respond to his touch. He’d flown big aircraft, 747S and KC-135S. In them there was always a certain lag. But the orbiter was much more responsive, given its size more like a fighter than a liner; he could feel he was flying a big craft, but the responses to the controls were positive and crisp.

  Today, though, Columbia was sluggish.

  It was time for his own egress…

  Things were calming down, though.

  The master alarm hadn’t sounded for, oh, three or four minutes. And when he scanned his instruments, when he put it together, the data from his eight-ball and his CRT and his alpha-mach indicators told him that things weren’t too bad. He still had, in fact, enough energy and altitude for a feasible landing profile. Miles from the runway, maybe, but feasible, out on a dry lake somewhere.

  He felt as if he’d spent half his life in front of these displays. Maybe he had, he thought. He felt at home here, in this busy, competent, glowing little cockpit.

  Just a day at the office.

  Lamb didn’t want to throw his life away. On the other hand, if Columbia was lost, that was the end of the space program, for sure.

  Maybe it was time to rewrite the rule books, one last time.

  He thought his way ahead, through the uncertainties of the next few minutes. He would have to manage his energy. He actually had to accelerate, to get to the ground with enough airspeed; by the time he got down to ten thousand feet he needed to have picked up to two hundred and ninety knots, plus or minus a few percent.

  He pitched Columbia’s nose down. His airspeed rose sharply.

  “Flight, Surgeon. I got six bail-outs. We lost one.”

  “…Six? Capcom—”

  White said, “Columbia, Houston. What’s going on? You’re dropping out of fifteen thousand. Tom, you asshole, are you still on the flight deck?”

  Fahy climbed away from her workstation and crossed to the capcom’s station. She plugged her headset into White’s loop. “Tom, this is Fahy. Get your ass out of there.”