Another glance at the control panel told her of the lost cause she faced. All main systems were gone, including the airrevitalization system, which explained why she was having a hard time breathing. Then she saw the front windowpanes, saw the growing cracks streaking across the 1.3-inch-thick panes.
Diane knew what that meant, and without another thought, she kicked her legs against the back of the seat and pushed her bruised body toward the left interdeck hatch, just aft of her flight seat, where she curled her fingers on the side rails and pulled herself into the mid deck compartment. The smoke there was thicker than in the flight deck, but she could still see her way through the—
The sight almost made her vomit, but the Marine in her took over, forcing control as she stared at the mangled and charred body parts floating in—
Hurry.
She had no time to waste. The moment those panes gave, the vacuum pressure would be unbearable as everything loose got sucked through the openings. The sudden loss of pressure would mean instant death.
Her hands reached the airlock hatch actuator lock lever at the rear of the crew compartment, and she turned it 180 degrees to unlatch it, pulling the D-shaped hatch toward her. The massive door pivoted up and to the side, exposing the roomy interior of the airlock. Diane floated inside and closed and locked the hatch behind her just as another explosion shook the vessel, giving Diane the impression that the orbiter would come apart any minute. The blast shoved her against the opposite side of the airlock, where the back of her head struck one of the aluminum alloy handholds on the sides of the locked hatch that led to the payload bay.
In an instant, the madness around her ceased and Diane Williams lost consciousness.
Ten
Sergei Dudayev watched the wingless orbiter tumble away after he blasted it one last time before the battery level dropped below the fifty percent mark. He decided to stop firing to conserve power in case he needed it before the ISS could reach the daylight portion of its orbit and replenish the battery charge.
Sergei adjusted the resolution of the spotting telescope of the GPATS module. At such short distance it gave him a clear view of the broken front windowpanes, which meant that the flight deck and the crew compartment had lost pressurization. He also noticed a missing payload bay door, most of the wings and vertical fin, and nearly half of the thermal protection tiles. The shield, which Sergei assumed was made out of segmented mirrors since it had deflected the initial laser shot, now floated away from the orbiter with one of the RMS arms still attached to it. Farther away, he saw the missing payload door, now a rotating hunk of twisted, blackened aluminum.
Sergei glanced at Endeavour one last time and shook his head. Fools. Maybe now they will concede to my people’s demands.
He shifted his gaze to the locked workstation.
******PROCEDURE VIOLATION******
TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED. SYSTEM RESET IN PROGRESS
******32:28:14******
Soon, he thought. Soon the warheads will be mine.
Eleven
“Come in Endeavour, over. Endeavour come in, over.”
In the midst of a chaos inside the Flight Control Room, Jake Cohen waited for an answer, but all he got was the low hissing static noise coming from the overhead speakers.
“Sir,” said the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Systems Engineer (EECOM) to Jake’s far left, a blond-headed man of about thirty with fair skin and a wide nose, wearing black-framed glasses. EECOM was responsible for monitoring Endeavour’s fuel cells, avionics, cabin-cooling systems, electrical-distribution systems, and cabinpressure-control systems. “We’re still getting S-band telemetry from the orbiter through the TDRS-White Sands link, and it shows zero pressurization inside the crew compartment and flight deck. I’m afraid that—”
“Yes, I know,” Jake said, more to himself than to anyone. “Endeavour just got hit multiple times by that damned laser!”
Silence in the control room.
“GUIDO,” Jake said a moment later. “Status.”
The Guidance Officer, call sign GUIDO, sitting a row in front of Jake, was responsible for monitoring onboard navigation and guidance computer software.
While looking at the telemetry data browsing across his twenty-inch color screen, GUIDO said, “Orbiter tumbling along all three axes while maintaining a concentric orbit with the station roughly six miles away. Guidance computer software showing a major malfunction. I’m afraid we can’t control the orbiter via remote.”
Jake glanced to his right at the Propulsion Systems Engineer. “Talk to me, PROP.”
The fifty-year-old PROP, a veteran astronaut himself, was responsible for monitoring and evaluating the Reaction Control and the Orbital Maneuvering System engines. He also managed propellants. PROP kept his eyes on the data displayed in his console. “Doesn’t look good. Major malfunctions on the OMS engines. Looks like the laser cracked the propellant tanks and they blew the moment Commander Williams fired them.”
Damn. I can’t believe this has actually happened. And Diane, the crew … God Almighty.
And that Russian bastard is still at large.
Closing his eyes, Jake Cohen removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He looked to his left. The Flight Director had already left the room to brief the NASA Administrator, who in turn would pass the information to the President and his staff.
“Wait … wait,” said the blond-headed EECOM. “The computers are showing nominal pressure inside the airlock. Oxygen content is at thirty-two percent. Pressure is 14.7 PSI.” Slowly, he turned to Jake. “Do you think that—”
Jake snapped forward. “Damned right I do! I say we got us some astronauts marooned inside that airlock! What’s the status of the pressure-control system and oxygen supply?”
The EECOM’s fingers worked on the keyboard as data flashed off and on the screen. After several seconds, he said, “We’re in luck. Pressure system is active and still trying to repressurize the crew compartment. My guess is that we got a serious opening to space inside that compartment and the system can’t pressurize it. I’m showing two fuel cells down and one still operational.”
Jake nodded. “Redirect the pressure-control system to support only the airlock, nothing else. Disconnect all other systems that might be draining the fuel cell. Let’s focus everything we have on keeping the atmosphere inside that airlock within the normal range. That will buy us some time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Since the pressure-control system didn’t have to operate at full power because all it was pressurizing was the volume of air inside the airlock, the single fuel cell could last much longer. This was a significant advantage because the oxygen used by Endeavour’s life-support system was the same liquid oxygen used by the fuel cell, along with liquid hydrogen, in an electrochemical reaction to produce electricity. The longer the fuel cell lasted, the longer that airlock would be not only fully pressurized, but also filled with air.
“It’s done. At the current load, that fuel cell should last us about twenty-four hours, give or take a few, depending on how many astronauts are alive,” commented the EECOM.
Jake stared at the blank screen, where only a few minutes before he had seen the images captured by Endeavour’s video cameras. Now he was blind, trying to help a dying orbiter while operating in the dark. Well, almost in the dark, he admitted. At least partial telemetry data continued to pour in, giving his support crew the information they might need in order to figure a way out of this mess.
Interlacing the fingers of his hands in front of his face, Jake closed his eyes, praying that at least somebody had made it to the airlock. Based on the conversation aboard Endeavour before the attack, Jake felt that Diane and McGregor were the two with the best chance of being inside that airlock because they should have been up in the flight deck controlling the orbiter and the RMS arm at the time of the HEP blast inside the crew compartment below.
I should have listened to you, Diane.
Jake Coh
en forced the guilt out of his mind. He needed his logical side operating at full capacity in order to guide his staff through this one. Every piece of telemetry data arriving into the Flight Control Room would have to be scrutinized by itself and in combination with other information to try to piece together a possible salvage operation of an orbiter that already appeared beyond salvage.
Twelve
Diane Williams pulled up so fast after releasing her Hornet’s ordnance that she thought the Gs would crush her. Her vision tunneled to the information projected on the F-18’s heads-up display. Diane kept the control column pulled back. The Hornet shot up into the overcast sky, its wings biting the air as it rolled above the clouds and the sun filled her cockpit, making her feel so detached from the world below. Flying gave her a sense of omnipotence she could get nowhere else. She belonged to a privileged class, an aviator of the United States Marines, pilot of one of the most coveted and feared war machines in the world: the Hornet. Her Hornet. And Diane pushed it, forced it to the outer limits of its design envelope, rammed it into the tightest turns that its titanium-layered honeycomb structure could take, shoved it across the sky in any imaginable way to accomplish the job. To fulfill her promise to America that she would put every single ounce of her life into doing what she had been trained to do.
But her engines suddenly flamed out. Lights filled her cockpit as her jet tumbled out of control, alarms blaring. But then the noise went away as fast as it had appeared, and Diane suddenly found herself lying in that hospital bed at El Toro Air Station. The room was dark, humid, quiet. The lamp on her nightstand filled the room with yellow light, but it was enough to illuminate the faces of the others present in that room. Diane saw Dr. Lisa Hottle’s face giving her a stern, yet compassionate look. Next to the doctor stood Gary McGregor in blue coveralls gazing at the floor, a large piece of glass embedded in his throat. Then Diane turned to the last person in the room, a large black man wearing a dark uniform. It was Colonel Frank Ward, his left hand holding an HEP charge. Then a blinding light filled the room, followed by a loud explosion and alarms, many alarms …
Another siren went off, but it didn’t belong inside the hospital room. Diane didn’t know where it had come from. The siren wasn’t part of the nightmare. The siren was here, inside the sealed airlock of the wounded orbiter. It was the alarm that NASA had installed in all shuttles to give crews a five minute warning before the oxygen supply would run out.
Dizzy and in severe pain, Diane kept her eyes closed. The throbbing on the back of her head challenged the piercing pain from her throat, where blood vessels had burst from the G-like pressure induced by the multiple explosions. The coppery taste of blood filled her senses with the same intensity as the general body soreness from bouncing around the flight deck like a rag doll.
Floating upside down, Diane opened her eyes, feeling what had to be the worst headache of her life. The relentless pounding of veins against her temples seemed amplified by the siren telling her she had less than five minutes’ worth of air inside that compartment, and from what she remembered she doubted Endeavour had any other pressurized compartment that could support life after the laser attack.
And McGregor, the UNSC soldiers …
Concentrate.
Turning off the alarm, she glanced through the four-inch-diameter observation window on the hatch leading to the payload bay, and visually checked the main cargo in Endeavour’s payload bay: the new and still untested Astronaut Maneuvering Vehicle—a fourperson unpressurized prototype module designed by Lockheed to provide teams of UNSC personnel the flexibility of moving in space quickly and efficiently. The first production AMV was not supposed to be ready for another year, but the problems aboard the ISS called for Lockheed to release its only prototype.
“Shit,” Diane whispered when spotting the vehicle upside down and jammed against the rear of the bay. Actually, most everything else that she could see through the narrow opening appeared out of place or missing.
Before she could attempt an Extravehicular Activity to check the damage done to the AMV and the other equipment in the payload bay, Diane had to start the hourlong 100 percent pure-oxygen prebreathing.
After a brief check that the integral oxygen tank for prebreathing was not operational, Diane grabbed the emergency portable oxygen unit off a built-in inner wall to her left. She actually needed the portable unit even if she wasn’t planning an EVA because the oxygen level inside the airlock was falling below the safety level.
She placed the clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth and turned a red knob on the pint-size canister connected to the mask through a thin plastic tube. Letting the canister float overhead, Diane stripped naked. Next she opened a compartment containing most of the “underwear” garments she would have to put on prior to donning the actual EMU—the space suit designed to provided pressure, thermal and micrometeoroid protection, communications, and full environmental control support for one astronaut. The EMU’s thick skin consisted of a number of layers, starting with an inner layer of urethane-coated nylon, followed by a restraining layer of Dacron, a thermal layer of neoprene-coated nylon, five layers of aluminized Mylar laminated with Dacron scrim, and an outermost layer made of Goretex, Kevlar, and Nomex for micrometeoroid protection.
Diane put on the Urine Collection Device—a pouch capable of holding one quart of liquid, derived from a device used by people with malfunctioning kidneys. She followed that with the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) which, similar to long underwear, consisted of a one-piece front-zippered suit made of a stretch-nylon fabric but laced with over three hundred feet of plastic tubing, through which chilled water would flow to control her body temperature.
The undergarments out of the way, and while still breathing directly from the oxygen canister, Diane connected the LCVG’s electrical harness to the upper torso section of the multilayered EMU she retrieved from another airlock compartment. She removed the EVA checklist attached to the upper torso’s left sleeve and, having done her share of space walks, she gave it a quick scan before flinging it aside.
She attached the electrical harness to the EMU. Because the orbiter’s communications system was dead, the electrical harness—designed to provide her with a biomedical and communications link to Mission Control—would not work until she reached the space station.
Next, she grabbed the connecting waist ring of the lower torso section—or suit pants—of the EMU, and, while floating in the middle of the airlock, she guided both legs into it. The lower torso came with boots, and joints in the hip, knee, and ankle to give the astronaut maximum mobility. Briefly removing the oxygen mask while extending both arms straight up, Diane “dived” into the upper torso section floating overhead, reattached the oxygen mask, and connected the tubing from the EMU to the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment before joining and securing the upper and lower torso sections with the waist-entry closures of the connecting rings.
She checked her watch. According to NASA regulations, she had another forty minutes of prebreathing before she could go outside, but because the crippled orbiter could not provide her suit with cooling water, oxygen, and electrical power during the long prebreathing period to conserve the oxygen and battery power inside the EMU’s backpack for actual EVA time, Diane decided to risk a prebreathing shortcut to maximize the eight hours’ worth of oxygen of the Primary Life Support System (PLSS) backpack unit. Besides, her emergency oxygen canister would be exhausted in another five minutes and the air quality inside the airlock was already below the safe level.
Diane backed herself against one of two PLSS units and secured it in place. She made the appropriate connections for feedwater and oxygen, and secured the display and control module on the front, which showed alpha and numeric readouts of oxygen level, fuel, and power remaining in the PLSS.
She grabbed one of the helmets, a clear polycarbonate pressure bubble with a neck connecting ring, and rubbed an antifog compound on the inside of the helmet. Next she placed
a communications cap on her head and connected it to the EMU electrical harness. Grabbing a pair of gloves and putting them on, she fastened the ends to the locking rings at the end of each EMU sleeve.
Taking a final breath of 100 percent oxygen from the portable unit, Diane removed the clear mask and let it float over head. Next, she lowered the helmet and locked it in place. Powering up the PLSS, she breathed again while pressurizing the suit to 16.7 PSI at 100 percent oxygen, two PSI above the airlock pressure, to create a pressure differential. Diane’s body responded with a slight discomfort in her ears and sinus cavities. She tried to compensate by yawning and swallowing, but the pressure in her ears remained. Pressing her nose against a small sponge mounted to her right, inside the helmet ring, Diane blew with her mouth closed, forcing air inside her ear cavities and equalizing the pressure.
Her eyes on the display module attached to her chest, she turned off the PLSS and waited one minute to check for suit leaks. The pressure dropped to 16.6 PSI, well within the maximum allowable rate of leakage of the shuttle EMU of 0.2 PSI per minute.
Satisfied, she dropped the pressure to 14.7 PSI and waited ten more minutes while slowly starting the airlock pressure bleed-down. The moment the pressure outside equaled the pressure inside the airlock, Diane checked the chest-mounted timer.
Forty-five minutes of prebreathing. It’ll have to do.
She took two additional minutes to bring the EMU pressure down gradually to six PSI instead of the recommended four PSI for maximum EMU flexibility without excessive muscle fatigue. At pressures higher than four PSI, the flight suit became more rigid, but Diane had no choice when presented with the option between risking nitrogen-induced bends and exerting a little more effort to move. In another fifteen minutes she planned to lower it to four psi to extend the life her PLSS.
Combat Page 51
