by Dean M. Cole
On Earth, the fire's heat would travel upward, away from the source, but here, the fumes had nowhere to go in the corridor's zero-G environment. The smoke just stacked up on itself.
Angela's passage into the tube pushed a wave of clear air ahead of her. Through the respite, she caught a glimpse of glowing wires and flaming insulation. With her left hand, she grabbed a conduit that ran along the opposing wall, trying to arrest her flight and brace herself for the thrust that the discharging fire extinguisher would impart.
A scream of agony burst through Angela's pursed lips as she yanked her hand from the hot metal pipe. Unchecked inertia sent her body tumbling deeper into the smoke-filled corridor.
Pain exploded across her right forearm as a blazing jet of burning insulation strafed it. The fire-retardant cloth of the sleeping garment proved to be anything but, as flames began to spread up its sleeve.
"Son of a …!" Angela yelled as she aimed the extinguisher's nozzle at her arm and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. It didn't activate. The lever wouldn't even depress.
She hadn't pulled the goddamned pin!
Still drifting, Angela held the extinguisher in her burned hand. She tried to snatch the pin with the hand that protruded from the end of the flaming sleeve, but it slipped from her fingers. She frantically batted at the damned thing again and finally yanked it free, snapping its lanyard and sending both pieces tumbling into the smoke.
Angela aimed at the burning arm and squeezed the trigger again. This time it worked, extinguishing her sleeve. But its thrust accelerated her body's tumble, sending her careening blindly into the next module. For a brief moment, alternating periods of black void and orange light filled her universe.
Then something punched her in the face.
For a disoriented, dazed moment, the woman just floated, shaking her head, trying to clear it.
The world no longer tumbled around her. She'd flown face first into the module's far wall. The blow had arrested her spin. Fortunately, the mask had absorbed much of the impact.
Stabilizing herself, Angela grabbed a nearby structure and turned her body back toward the flickering light and smoke.
Finally, the module's emergency lights snapped on, flooding the smoke-filled room with their amber glow. That should've happened as soon as the module lost electricity. Something must be pumping enough voltage through the station to spoof the circuits into thinking they're still powered.
On this end of the smoke-filled passage, she spotted an electrical junction box connected to the bundle of conduits. Smoke radiated from the hot surfaces of several of the pipes that led from the box into the corridor. As she watched, one gained an orange hue. The junction box had a large, untripped circuit-breaker. Angela kicked off the far wall and glided to it. Nearing her target, she felt heat radiating from the spider web of cables and conduits. She raised the extinguisher and then slammed its bottom into the top of the breaker. It snapped open with a loud pop.
Immediately, the crackle of burning insulation within the connected conduits began to diminish, falling away like the sound of a whistling teakettle pulled from a hot burner.
"Oh, thank goodness," she whispered, the respirator muffling her words.
Yellow light flickered with diminishing intensity within the smoky corridor. Angela eased into the tube. She tested the temperature of a thankfully cool structural member and then braced herself against it. She aimed the extinguisher into the base of the flames and squeezed the trigger.
Now that she'd extinguished the fire, Angela went around the Zvezda Crew Module, manually switching off all of the components connected to the fried wires. Then she tried to reset the Power Management and Distribution computer, but the PMAD refused to respond. It was dead, a six million-dollar paperweight.
Through the respirator's hazed visor, Angela checked her O2 bottle.
Its gauge hovered near zero!
She toggled the PMAD's switch a third time. Still nothing happened. "Shit!" she said, smacking its now dingy white metallic surface.
If Angela didn't restore power and get the crew module's air going soon, she'd have to abandon this section. Thanks to recent modifications, the environmental control computer had automatically closed all of the ISS's hatches to stop smoke from filling the entire station. Now she needed to retreat to that smoke-free region before her oxygen supply depleted.
Frustrated, shaking her head, Angela pushed off the wall and drifted toward the nearest hatch. She pulled up short at the sight of a three-quarters closed door.
"Why didn't you close?!" she whispered. The hatches usually took a few seconds to close. The power must have failed before they could seal!
Angela pulled the door fully open and stared into another smoke-hazed module.
"Shit, shit, shit!"
The steady hiss of her oxygen supply faded and then fell silent. She tried to draw a breath but the mask's one-way valves prevented external air from entering, so it just sucked down onto her face. Angela pulled it off. It peeled away from her sweaty skin with a wet slurp. Caustic smoke instantly assaulted her eyes and lungs. Her vision muddled as zero-G tears piled up in burning eyes. Angela started coughing as every breath of the station's heated atmosphere scraped at the inside of her chest.
Blinking furiously and rubbing soot-grimed hands against her eyes, Angela aimed for the next module and pushed off the wall. She drifted into the room as another spasm of coughs wracked her body. Between hacks, she spotted her quarry through the haze.
Angela redirected her drift, angling for the safe haven. She grabbed a structural member and flipped over so that her feet slid into its lower torso assembly. A moment later and still coughing, she pulled the hard-shelled upper torso of the spacesuit over her head, snaking her hands into its arms. The woman struggled to connect the two halves, but the hacking spasms made it impossible.
"Damnit!" Angela screamed, abandoning the effort.
She grabbed the helmet from its mount and pulled it over her head, locking it into place. With her watering eyes squeezed shut, the astronaut activated the suit's environmental controls. Finally, cool, fresh air began to flow around her face. Angela inhaled it, but the movement of her chest drew smoke up from the suit's open waist. She tried again to latch it, but her resumed body-wracking coughs made it impossible.
Angela felt her mind beginning to fuzz.
With a force of will, she tamped down the spasms, concentrating on sipping the stream of air that flowed through the helmet. She closed her eyes. Using slow methodic movements, Angela finally sealed the suit. The latch clicked home just as her spasming diaphragm won its battle, and the held breath exploded from her lips.
A cough-filled minute later, the suit's systems gained the upper hand, finally clearing the last of the caustic fumes from its internal environment.
Floating in the middle of the module's hazy atmosphere and breathing heavily, Angela stared into the yellow glare of the nearest emergency light. She'd initially thought that the loss of electricity had been limited to the Zvezda Service Module. Now she wondered how the rest of the station had fared. With the complete loss of power, the smoke had likely reached every corner of the ISS. Other than the few empty spacesuits that haunted the station's interior like silent sentries, she probably had no safe haven.
Angela's eyes widened. "Nate!"
Mabel was dead, her burned corpse had been all too real, but Angela hadn't seen Nate or their makeshift habitat. Apparently, poor Mabel had escaped it, again.
A shadow drifted past a nearby external port.
Angela's eyes widened. "What the hell?" She kicked off a wall and glided toward the window. "Oh, thank you! I can't believe it. They've come for me! They're …!"
The words and short-lived hope died along with a piece of her soul.
"No, no, no …" Angela whispered as she stared disbelievingly at the scene outside. How could this have happened? A debris field, a cloud of multicolored, twisted material cluttered the narrow portion
of space visible through the small window.
"What happened?"
Suddenly, the shadow returned as a large, dark mass blotted out the scene. A moment later, it disappeared, its broad flat end flying out of sight like an undulating tapeworm. Angela glimpsed its black surface long enough to recognize it as one of the station's giant solar panels.
She inched closer to the port until the helmet's curved visor clinked against the thick clear panel. Through narrowed eyes she looked past the tumbling bits of debris, focusing on the nearest portion of the solar array truss.
"What the hell?"
Bare wires now ran the length of the structure. But there shouldn't have been any exposed cables. In the areas where they touched the truss, the wires had twisted and deformed. It appeared that they had partially melted, spot-welding themselves to the adjacent metal bars.
Angela released a string of curse words that would have made a pro football coach blush.
Somehow, all of the wires that carried high-voltage electricity from the solar arrays to the station had superheated.
At first, she'd assumed that Mabel had chewed through some electrical insulation and been cooked by the resultant short circuit, but there's nothing the mouse could've done to cause this level of destruction.
Angela's heart sank as she considered just what could have poured that much power into the arrays, enough to fry the entire system.
It must have been a massive solar flare! The Sun must've launched a coronal mass ejection or CME straight at the Earth. The powerful pulse of energy had slammed into the station.
Now the astronaut wondered how many millisieverts of radiation she had absorbed. A CME of this magnitude had never struck the station. She'd have to check a dosimeter later.
Normally, the team at Mission Control in Houston alerted the crew of incoming flares. But considering her looped plea for help had gone unanswered for two weeks now, she doubted anyone had known it was coming.
If there is anyone left.
Angela shook her head, vigorously, as if doing so could quash the thought.
"Concentrate, Brown!" she said with a growl.
She needed more information than this limited field of view could provide.
Where's Nate?
Can't think of him right now. Bigger fish to fry.
The thought brought back the radiation concern which raised the ugly specter of why she hadn't been warned.
The vicious mental loop threatened to end her.
"Move it, Commander!"
The woman banished the thoughts as best she could and kicked off a wall.
A few moments later, she floated into the Cupola.
Angela felt ill as she stared open-mouthed through the faceted windows of the observatory. Like a slow-motion video of a Rocky Mountain blizzard, thousands of twisted chunks of foam and melted plastic tumbled lazily across a surreal panorama of destruction. Beyond the storm, the few solar panels visible from the Cupola writhed, their now untethered inboard ends oscillating to and fro like black cobras dancing to the warbling whistle of a snake charmer's pungi.
"Aw, shit," Commander Brown whispered.
Chapter 12
Angela opened the external airlock door. A moment later, she floated out into a slow-motion debris storm that twinkled with the radiance of a million diamonds. Light scintillated and flickered all around her as she moved out of the station's shadow. The woman squinted against its radiance. Even with the sun behind her, its reflected light felt as if it could burn through the back of her eyes and drill into her brain. She slid the helmet's tinted visor into place, and the pain relented.
The astronaut reached out and tried to grab one of the clear flakes. The first one crumbled between the fingers of her glove and floated away like sugar. Sunlight flared anew within each granule, imparting them with an internal brilliance that fluoresced like the fire of a microscopic nuclear furnace.
"There's a cloud of glass shards around the entire station," Angela said. She'd left a voice recorder pinned to the helmet speaker of one of the station's spacesuits. Angela had left both the radio and the recorder turned on so that she could leave a running narrative of her spacewalk in case … Well, just in case.
Another, larger flake drifted inches from her visor. Angela felt her eyes cross as she focused on the chip of glass. She reached out for it. Being careful not to crush or bump it, she gently pinched the flat crystal between thumb and forefinger. In spite of her best efforts, the shard fractured. Part of it floated away, but she still held the largest fragment. Angela turned it over, studying its opposing surfaces. One side was perfectly flat, but on the crystal's opposite surface, light reflected off of grooves that formed a recognizable pattern.
"It's the glass coating from the arrays. Somehow the stuff's been blasted from the surface of one of the solar panels."
Angela unclipped her lanyard from the airlock's hard point and worked her way hand-over-hand along the outside of the station.
"Can't quite see them from here, so I'm transferring to the truss structure."
The astronaut passed back into the station's shadow. She retracted the tinted visor and studied the snow-like storm of debris that surrounded her spacesuit.
"There are bits of melted and twisted white insulation floating along with the glass shards."
A couple of pieces ricocheted off her helmet with audible clicks. Angela waved her free hand in front of the visor. "It's pretty cluttered out here."
She heard a faint squeak.
"Are you alright in there, Nate?"
She neither expected nor received an answer. In spite of the shit storm that floated around her, Angela grinned at the mental image of his twitching pink nose sniffing at the helmet's speaker. She'd found the fat little mouse hiding in the part of the station farthest from the Zvezda module. But even there, the air must have still been pretty caustic. Nate had been lethargic. Little spasms and squeaks—mouse coughs, Angela guessed—had rocked the pudgy guy. She'd placed him inside the same spare spacesuit that now also hosted the voice recorder. After purging all of the bad air, she'd shut off the flow of oxygen. Nate didn't need a constant supply of O2, and the woman didn't want to use her finite supply of CO2 scrubbing lithium hydroxide for the purpose. He could last a day or more on the air in the suit's relatively cavernous interior.
Angela checked the sensor wrapped around her left forearm. "The dosimeter is still green. Radiation levels appear nominal."
Had anyone still been in Houston, she was sure that, out of an abundance of caution, the team at Johnson Space Center would have ordered her to remain in the shielded portion of the Russian Orbital Segment, or ROS, for the next few days. And while her time up here might feel rather unlimited, she didn't exactly have unlimited electrical resources. If she didn't get power restored soon, things were going to get bad in a hurry.
"You better not pee on that mic boom, Nate. I may have to use that suit someday."
Angela wasn't too concerned about the chance that he might start chewing on components. She'd clipped Nate's favorite chew toy to the inner surface of the suit's neck ring. When she'd left, the little rascal had been hard at work on the small nylon bone.
The astronaut brushed aside some floating insulation and then latched onto the truss structure. A few handholds later, her helmet rose above the plane of the station and out of its shadow. She squinted as thousands of swarming shards shined their reflected light into her eyes, making it impossible to see beyond a few feet.
"I mean it, Nate," she said as her hand fumbled for the sunshield. Finally finding it, Angela slid the tinted lens over her helmet's visor. Its polarized filter cut the glare, revealing the greater universe. "And you better not poop in …" The words died in her mouth, and the grin fell away.
"Oh shit!"
Angela stared across the length of the truss.
"All of the port side solar panels are toast," she said dejectedly.
The array support arms continued their ninety-minute rotation, b
ut every one of the long solar panels in that direction had somehow disconnected from its inboard mount. Anchored to their outboard ends, all eight of the arrays on the port or left side of the station waved slowly to and fro like the tentacles of a giant sea anemone. Each slow undulation launched another cloud of sparkling glass shards.
It was simultaneously the most beautiful and singularly horrible thing she'd ever seen. It looked as if she'd been transported to some extraterrestrial world where space-based anemone released crystalline eggs in orgasmic waves.
"They're all flapping like seagrass."
Angela's eyes widened. She checked her dosimeter again.
It still showed normal radiation levels.
"The flare hasn't returned, so why are they still moving?"
She had expected to see the support arms still rotating, but out here in the vacuum of space, the panels shouldn't be flapping like that. Their internal friction should've slowed them by now.
A fresh wave began to propagate down the ribbon of black material. The movement released another cloud of crystals.
As Angela watched its terrible beauty, she suddenly understood. Each time a portion of the panel flaked away, it exposed the raw substrate to excess ultraviolet radiation. Under the sun's hot glare, the unprotected black surface must be expanding, causing it to flex like a synthetic muscle.
It wasn't a giant leap in logic. Angela had reason to think this. NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, had recently upgraded all of the station's solar panels. The new material converted light to electricity more efficiently than had the previous generation. In early development, the new substrate had suffered from heat expansion-related defects. However, the contractor reported that they had engineered the problem out of the final flight-ready panels.
"Bullshit you did," Angela said with a growl. "You lying sacks of shit!" She shook her head. "That low-bid contractor didn't fix the expansion problem," she reported to Nate and the recorder. "I don't know how it got past NASA's quality control people, but these panels were ticking time bombs. The solar flare must've released enough UV radiation to penetrate their glass coating. As soon as the substrate got exposed, it started expanding, fracturing the rest of the glass in a slow-motion cascading failure. Once the first part of it cracked, the rest was doomed to follow suit."
