She lowered a sun visor over the helmet before reaching for the hatch actuator lock lever and turning it 180 degrees. She pulled the D-shaped door toward her a few inches and then rotated it up until it rested with the low-pressure side facing the airlock ceiling.
Thirteen
“What did you say?” asked Jake Cohen, slowly turning toward the blond-headed EECOM, the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Systems Engineer.
“S-band telemetry shows zero pressurization inside the airlock, sir.”
“Dammit!”
“No, sir. You don’t understand. The pressure didn’t leak out. It was intentionally bled out by someone inside the airlock. My data is also showing an opened hatch to the payload bay. Someone up there just started an EVA.”
“And we can’t talk to the astronaut?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. All we can do is read the telemetry data on S-band.”
“Damn. I wish that K-band antenna was there,” said Cohen. In reality, Endeavour had given up the K-band antenna to accommodate a second RMS manipulator arm. The K-band antenna could have allowed an alternate communications channel between the orbiter and Houston Control after the S-band antenna was damaged during the laser shoot-out.
Jake Cohen grabbed the phone to update his superiors. Just thirty minutes ago he had gotten word from Andrews Air Force base that a squadron of F-22s armed with ANSAT—antisatellite—missiles was standing by waiting for the order to shoot down the station before the terrorist regained control of the warheads. Now maybe there was a chance that the station could still be salvaged if the surviving astronauts could reach the ISS in time.
Fourteen
Diane Williams held on to the handrails to push herself through the opening and into the payload bay, where she closed her eyes to avoid getting disoriented from the multiaxial rotation of the orbiter with respect to the Earth. She had not noticed it before because of her enclosure inside the airlock, but now that she was in the bay, her eyes instantly sent an alarm to her brain. Vertigo. Nausea.
Fighting what she knew would be deadly spatial disorientation, Diane opened her eyes, but kept them focused inside the payload bay, forcing herself to ignore anything outside her small world. Breathing slow and deep to get her body under control, she decided that her initial observation from inside the airlock had been correct. Everything seemed out of place, with most of the standard equipment missing, including one of the two Manned Maneuvering Units (MMU) or self-propelled backpacks, one payload bay door, both RMS arms, the segmented mirror, video cameras, one Payload Assistance Module, floodlights. All gone.
Diane pushed herself to the rear of the cargo area, where she reached the open-canopy AMV, realizing that it would take a miracle to get any use out of it. The missing MMU had crashed against the delicate control panel of the AMV, smashing the stealth vehicle electronics, which, on closer inspection, she decided were vital for proper operation of the AMV’s jet thrusters.
Appalled at her bad luck, Diane exhaled heavily, pounding a gloved hand against the black composite skin of the crippled vehicle, her only way of reaching the station … or was it?
Her eyes darted across the payload bay toward the undamaged MMU, the backpack system used by astronauts since the 1980s for untethered EVA. Although NASA prohibited astronauts from using the MMU at distances farther than three hundred feet from the orbiter, Diane knew that as long as there was compressed nitrogen in the MMU tanks, the jets could propel her for miles. The only problem she faced was that she didn’t know which way to go. But Diane noticed that the Lockheed AMV carried a small homing unit, which she unstrapped from the side of the vehicle. She also grabbed one of four HandHeld Maneuvering Units from the back of the AMV. The small HHMUs were most likely intended to be used by the UNSC soldiers to maneuver themselves away from the AMV after arriving at the station. Now Diane would use it as a backup in case something went wrong with her MMU.
Armed with the homing device and the HHMU, Diane pushed herself back toward the MMU parked next to the airlock. She stopped in front of the maneuvering unit, attached to the payload bay wall with a framework that had a stirruplike foot restraint. Diane placed both EMU boots inside the stirrups and visually inspected the unit, checking the battery and nitrogen-propellant readings, both of which showed fully charged.
Turning around, Diane backed herself against the MMU, until the PLSS backpack locked in place. She extended both control arms of the MMU and placed her hands on the hand controllers. The right controller would give her acceleration for roll, pitch, and yaw, while the left one gave her the power to produce translational acceleration along three different planes: forward-back, up-down, and left-right.
Diane used her left hand to reach for the main power switch located above her right shoulder, and a second later the MMU locator lights came on. She reached with her right hand for the manual locator light switch over her left shoulder and turned it off. It was bad enough that the Russian aboard the ISS might be able to pick her up on radar. She definitely didn’t feel like flashing her location like a beacon in the darkness of space.
Strapping the small HandHeld Maneuvering Unit to one of the MMU arms, and the homing radar to the other, Diane prepared herself to execute a maneuver she had never done before.
She currently moved with the same translational and rotational speed as Endeavour. She had to jettison away from the rotating wreckage without changing her rotational velocity with respect to the orbiter so that a section of the orbiter would not come crashing against her.
Since the orbiter seemed to be rotating around an axis close to the center of the payload bay, Diane decided to slowly jet herself toward it, reaching a position nearest to Endeavour’s zero-rotation point.
She applied full pressure to the aft-facing jets, which spewed nitrogen in one direction and gently pushed her in the other, along a line near perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Twenty seconds later she had moved close to 150 feet from the orbiter, which continued to rotate just as fast as she did.
The Earth, orbiter, and the cosmos flashing on her viewplate, Diane applied two lateral thrusts to counter her clockwise rotation, making a few fine adjustments until she floated upside down, with a large portion of the South American continent hanging overhead.
At that distance she finally saw the damage done to the orbiter, realizing the power of the GPATS laser. Actually, Endeavour didn’t look like an orbiter anymore, but more like a black-and-white cylindrical hunk of space junk.
Diane also slowly came to terms with the fact that she was alone, forgotten, probably given up for dead by Mission Control. All she had was the gear she had taken with her. The compressed nitrogen inside her MMU tanks. The eight hours’ worth of oxygen and pressurization that the PLSS could provide her EMU suit, plus the thirty-minute emergency oxygen reserve unit below the PLSS’s main oxygen tanks. She wished she could use her radio, somehow tell Mission Control—tell Jake—that she had survived. But her only link to ground was through an orbiter that no longer existed. Diane was her own spaceship, her own world. The steady flow of oxygen from the PLSS system—carried through a maze of tubes into the back of her helmet—was her life. She depended on it as much as she depended on the system’s heater exchange and sublimator to warm the oxygen before it reached the inside of her helmet to avoid fogging the faceplate. Diane depended on the chilled water running through hundreds of feet of plastic tubing lacing her suit liner to maintain her body temperature. She relied on the multiple layers of insulation of the EMU suit to keep her body from direct exposure to temperatures that would boil her blood in seconds.
Diane Williams drew from a distinguished space career and from her decade of military training to shove those thoughts aside and concentrate on the job. She was Mission Commander. She was in control of her space vehicle, regardless of whether that vehicle measured as large as an orbiter or as minute as her EMU enclosure. Being in charge meant keeping her emotions and fears aside, letting her logical side take over. It meant a
ctivating the homing unit and steering her MMU propulsion system toward a space station out of her visual range, but a station she knew floated out there, somewhere in the vast emptiness of space.
Diane Williams glanced at Endeavour one last time, thought about McGregor and the UNSCF soldiers for one final moment before using the jets to turn around and align herself with the information shown on the liquid crystal display of the homing device. Diane fired the thrusters until she’d put herself in a collision course with the space station. She hoped her orbital trajectory would get her to the station in less than eight hours.
Fifteen
******PROCEDURE VIOLATION******
TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED. SYSTEM RESET IN PROGRESS
******07:15:14******
Sergei Dudayev stared at the screen while eating from a pouch of dried peaches. The moment was near. During his last orbital pass over the Caucasus Mountains, he had gotten confirmation of the deployment orders. Russia refused to yield to Chechnya’s request to take possession of nuclear warheads for self-defense. It had also refused to pull back the tank divisions deployed to the border.
Soon I will show them that we mean our threats.
Sixteen
Seven and a half hours into her journey to reach the station, Diane Williams began to feel the effects of the carbon dioxide her nearly discharged Primary Life Support System backpack could not fully extract from her EMU suit. The centrifugal fan of the PLSS, running at nearly twenty thousand RPM, slowly failed to draw the contaminated oxygen from the normal rate of 0.17 cubic meter per minute down to 0.14 and dropping—according to her chest-mounted display. In addition, the slow warming trend inside the suit also told her that the PLSS feedwater pump and heat exchanger and sublimator, designed to maintain a steady flow of chilled water through the hundreds of feet of plastic tubing lacing the LCVG underwear Diane wore, were also fading.
The situation would only get worse, with the suit slowly turning into a greenhouse as humidity and temperature got out of control, fogging the faceplate and eventually suffocating her.
She had to act, and fast, while she could still see through the pressurized polycarbonate plastic sphere underneath the gold-coated visor protecting her eyes from the blinding ultraviolet rays of a sun that had loomed over the horizon a half hour ago. Diane activated the EMU’s purge valve to bleed the carbon dioxide into space before switching to the secondary oxygen pack NASA added to the bottom of the unit to ensure the safety of astronauts in case of main PLSS failure.
Operating in open-loop mode, where the oxygen she breathed did not get circulated back to the PLSS but went through the purge valve, Diane checked the timer on the chest-mounted display. She had around fifty minutes’ worth of oxygen left.
That should be enough.
Squeezing the last of the nitrogen pressure inside the Manned Maneuvering Unit’s tanks, Diane used the station’s long frame, only five hundred feet away, to block the blinding sun. So far, the station showed no sign of alarm.
Soon that’ll change, she decided, aware of the station’s proximity sensors. Although they had not been sensitive enough to detect her yet, they were designed to detect any object with a radar cross section larger than a half foot getting within five hundred feet of the station.
Her viewplate beginning to fog and her EMU suit temperature climbing out of the comfort zone, Diane opened the purge valve a bit more, which also meant her oxygen supply would decrease at a faster rate. She didn’t have a choice. She had to keep the helmet from fogging at all costs while commanding the MMU to thrust her toward the hyperbaric airlock attached to the Unity Module.
Seventeen
UNSC15KTSN001 HAS BEEN SELECTED INSERT VALID UNSCF BADGE TO ACTIVATE
******00:59******
Sergei Dudayev was ready when the slot under the keyboard opened. Upon inserting the badge, the screen changed to a blinking:
UNCS15KTSN001 IS READY TO LAUNCH
The Russian cosmonaut smiled. Then the station’s proximity alarm went off.
Eighteen
Diane Williams noticed a number of red lights flashing on some modules. The proximity alarm motion sensors had detected her. She needed a decoy.
Unstrapping the HandHeld Maneuvering Unit from the side of the PLSS, Diane disengaged herself from the backpack propulsion system that had carried her all the way there. A hard kick against the MMU to push herself toward the station, and Diane watched the MMU tumble out of control away from her.
Now came the tricky part. All she had to propel herself toward the station was the HHMU, very similar to the ones used for EVAs during the Gemini Program of the 1960s, and seldom used by modern-day space voyagers because of the readily available and highly sophisticated MMUs.
Diane held the three-jet maneuvering gun with both hands. There were two jets located at the ends of the rod and aimed back. A third jet, located at the center of the rod, faced forward. Remembering the technique used by those early space explorers, Diane Williams centered the gun close to her lower chest—the place she estimated to be closest to her center of mass. Visually lining up the rear-facing jets with the airlock hatch roughly three hundred feet away, Diane fired the gun, releasing a symmetrical burst of compressed oxygen from both jets, propelling herself more or less in the desired direction.
Finally learning the limitations of the HHMU—and also the frustration of those Gemini astronauts—Diane found herself making slight correction on the firing angle of the jets while lowering the gun to her waist, below the chest-mounted display to avoid a slight rotational motion induced by firing the thrusters out of line with her true center of mass. Slowly, using a combination of forward thrusts and also firing the reverse thruster to break her momentum, Diane reached the airlock hatch.
Nineteen
The proximity alarms blaring, Sergei Dudayev checked the radar and verified the existence of an object at less than five hundred feet from the station.
Puzzled, he floated back into Unity and up to the cupola. Using a restraint system that enabled him to rotate easily for viewing through any of the windows, the Russian spotted an empty Manned Maneuvering Unit drifting away from the station.
An MMU?
Realizing that the ISS didn’t carry any MMUs, Sergei concluded that unless for some very strange law of physics one of Endeavour’s MMUs had been dislodged from its flight station and floated in this direction, the presence of the backpack system could only mean one thing.
Twenty
After performing an emergency bleed of the air inside the airlock by using the small control panel built in on the D-shaped EVA hatch door, Diane Williams pressed her left hand against the manual unlocking lever while holding on to the adjacent handle with her right. Three full clockwise turns, and she pulled the hatch door back several inches before a spring-loaded mechanism rotated it upward. Floating inside the airlock, Diane closed the hatch behind her and repressurized the compartment.
Twenty-one
Sergei noticed the red lights blinking on the control panel of the crew support station, which told him that an emergency airlock bleed had been done. The EVA hatch had been opened, then closed, and now the airlock was being repressurized.
Cursing his stupidity for assuming that the crew of Endeavour had perished in the attack, Sergei kicked his legs against the side of the cupola and reached Unity, sighing in relief when noticing that the hatch connecting the airlock to the bottom of the node was still closed. Without further thought, he locked it from the inside.
Twenty-two
Diane finished pressurizing the airlock and noticed the green light above the hatch connecting her compartment to Unity turning red. Realizing that the Russian had most likely found her, she decided not to depressurize her EMU suit just yet. Instead, she reached for the communications panel on the side of the airlock wall and set it to the standard EVA mode UHF frequency 121 Mhz. Next, she remotely switched on the station’s K-band antenna to close the ISS-Houston link via a TRDS and White Sands Tracking Station.<
br />
“Houston, this is Endeavour’s Mission Commander Diane Williams, over.”
“Wh—what? Come in … come in, Commander! Jesus Christ! We thought … great to hear from you!” Diane heard an unfamiliar voice coming through.
“I have little time before Dudayev catches on and cuts us off. I’ve reached the station. I’m trapped inside the airlock and have less than twenty minutes left of oxygen in my PLSS.”
“Diane, this is Jake.”
Diane smiled thinly. “Jake, the orbiter’s gone. McGregor and the UNSCF soldiers didn’t make it. The bastard now has me locked out of the station.”
“Calm down and listen carefully there might be a way to—”
Diane frowned. “Houston? Houston? Come in, Houston.”
Twenty-three
A few keystrokes on the computer keyboard of the Multipurpose Applications Console, and Sergei disconnected the communications link between the airlock and the rest of the station. An American astronaut—Diane Williams—had managed to exchange a few words with Houston Control, and although Sergei had not been pleased with that fact, he had at least gotten a good idea of Diane’s desperate oxygen situation. The American was running out of air, and in another twenty minutes she would no longer present any danger to his mission.
He commanded the computer system to purge the airlock.
Twenty-four
“Houston, can you read? Hous—”
The emergency purge alarm went off inside the airlock, conveying the Russian’s intentions. Glad that she had maintained EMU pressurization, Diane searched for the maintenance tools stowed inside compartments on all four walls of the airlock, finding what she sought: a heavy-duty, battery-operated drill, to which she attached a four-inch-diameter stainless-steel serrated disk at the end of the drive shaft. She had seen what the tool could do when McGregor had cut open the jammed Titan shroud to release the segmented mirror.
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