by Dean M. Cole
Reluctantly, Angela turned to inspect the other half of the station's solar panels, the eight arrays attached to the opposite end of the truss. Fresh anger washed over her as she watched the same surreal, alien-like release of glass shards burst from the other eight gently surging panels.
"Damnit! I've lost all sixteen of them!"
The main solar arrays weren't the only ones on the station. Angela craned her neck, trying to look aft.
"I can't quite see the Russian panels from here. Hang on."
She latched her tether to the truss's outermost hard point. Then the astronaut released her grip on the truss structure.
"I'll be able to see them from a higher vantage point."
A gentle nudge of her hand induced a slow, flat spin and sent the astronaut drifting upward, away from the station. As she ascended, Angela played out her tether's slack. The slow rotation gave her an ever-increasing field of view. Soon she could see the entire station. When she reached the end of the lanyard, a light jolt reversed her direction, but she'd already seen enough.
Too much, actually.
Tears flowed.
Angela didn't try to stop them.
Why bother?
She was a dead woman.
From inside the station, she'd seen that one of the power wires still had its covering of white insulation. The sight of the undamaged cable had elicited the hope that she would find some intact arrays and would be able to configure the station to operate on reduced power—even now she could see that a second cable had survived on the other half of the assembly as well—but this wasn't a reduction.
It was a complete loss!
"They're all gone," Angela said, shaking her head.
She felt as if she were narrating her own death, because, without an electrical supply, she wasn't long for this world. Unlike the Space Shuttles and the Apollo ships before them, the station didn't have fuel cells. She had plenty of water and liquid O2, but without electricity, she couldn't even convert it into breathable oxygen in a manner sufficient to extend her life beyond a few days.
"Nate, we are well and truly—!"
A grunt exploded from her lips as her rebounding spacesuit collided with the truss structure. Angela arched her body and snapped her head back, narrowly avoiding smacking her visor into a piece of shiny metal. She grabbed a structural member and reined in her inertia, preventing a second trip out to the end of the tether.
The tears had started to dry under the gentle flow of the suit's conditioned air, but now they returned.
"Shit, shit, shit!" she screamed.
Her visor clicked as it came to rest against the bright cable. Angela blinked several times, trying to clear the moisture. The piled-up tears made the shiny metal look like flowing mercury.
Suddenly, the astronaut froze. Releasing the adjacent structural member she touched her gloved hand to the bare, quarter-inch-thick cable.
"Could it?"
A moment later, she finally blinked the last of the water from her vision. A slowly undulating teardrop floated inside her visor. Beyond it, her gloved fingers traced the braided strands of wire. She nodded. The hint of a grin parted her lips. "Yes, it sure the hell can."
"Houston," she said to Nate and the voice recorder, "We have a solution … maybe."
Chapter 13
"Shit, shit, shit!" Vaughn screamed through a throat constricted by sheer terror. Beneath his hands and their white-knuckled death grip on the thick cable, his body swung like a 250-pound pendulum. Nothing but a thousand feet of empty air separated the bottom of Vaughn's shoes from the rushing river at the base of the canyon.
The red-faced man shook his head. How the hell had it come to this?
After finding his mother's dropped coffee mug, Vaughn had spent hours on her computer, searching the internet for information. The networks had crashed in the early hours of the Disappearance, but apparently, as an ever-increasing portion of the world's population vanished, the interwebs had come back online. In the closing hours, the remnants of humanity had chronicled the advance of the wave as it finished its sweep of the planet.
The last report had come from an individual in New Zealand. After that, all active communications and uploads had fallen silent.
Having the carpet of hope yanked out from under him had plunged Vaughn down a dark well. One he'd wallowed in for the two weeks since his arrival in the mile-high city.
After finding his mother's lipstick-lined coffee mug and following the all-too-enlightening internet search, Vaughn had departed her house to the hard rocking sounds of AC/DC's Have a Drink on Me.
"Sounds like a goddamned good idea to me!"
Over the next two weeks, the man had worked his way down Boulder's bar-lined Pearl Street. On more than one occasion, he'd awoken face down on a bar floor, often in a puddle of bile and booze. It was a miracle that he hadn't drowned in the pooled vomit.
That morning he'd woken with the words of Stephen King's Andy Dufresne echoing in his throbbing head: "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
After a couple of weeks' worth of leisurely trying to kill himself, Vaughn had decided to take a more proactive tack.
It was time to get busy dying.
First he had returned to his mother's home. Vaughn had walked through the house and into the backyard. Lying down on his side, he propped his head up on a hand, the supporting elbow resting on brown grass now sprinkled with green blades. The haunting, lipstick-lined coffee cup sat atop the now closed hardback book like a small, makeshift memorial.
Vaughn clinked his twenty-four-ounce can of liquid courage against the cup. "You always supported me, Mom, even when I was a screw-up—which was pretty much all the time." He raised the can in a toast. "Nothing's changed about that."
"Happier alone?" He shook his head. "Don't need anybody or anyone? What a crock of shit. As the saying goes, I've lived to regret that one."
He took a long draw from the beer, then wiped his lips with his shirtsleeve.
"But I have a remedy for that. I'll be with you soon. Gonna take a drive down to Colorado Springs, pay a visit to the Royal." It was the name they'd always used for the Royal Gorge suspension bridge, the world's tallest. "No way for me to screw that up. I jump from there," he said and then waved the beer in the air, "and it's bye-bye, Vaughn."
He took another pull from the tall boy.
"So, like I said, I'll be joining you soon, Mom." He paused, and a confused look took over his features. "Or will I? Where did you go?"
Vaughn shook his head.
The question had rattled around his polluted mind for weeks now. Where in the hell had everyone gone? Had they been vaporized? If so, why hadn't their clothes been left behind? In the days since the Disappearance, Vaughn hadn't seen so much as a mosquito.
Had all of the planet's animal life been …
What?
Vaporized?
Cooked off?
Elevated to a higher dimension?
"Is that it, Mom? Are you kicking back on some higher plane? Have I been left behind? Am I a ghost, the boogeyman in some kid's closet?"
He hoisted the can again. "I'll drink to that."
And so, he did.
After a long, wet belch, Vaughn said, "At least I don't have to worry about something eating me." He winced. "Sorry. TMI?" But apparently, the man wasn't too sorry, because he expanded on the thought. "You see, I don't think I'll even rot. Probably just end up as a broken mummy at the bottom of the canyon."
He paused and then pursed his lips. "I know, definitely too much information that time."
He poured the last of the beer into his mother's cup, then stood. "I love you, Mom."
Three hours later, he stood again, this time with his back to the bridge, his heels lit upon the angle iron ledge and nothing but a thousand feet of air between his boot-clad toes and the railroad-lined river below. To either side, his hands had a death grip on the handrail that dug into his back.
Of course, Vaughn couldn't see said boots.
Looking down, he peered over his ample belly—the indulgences of the past two weeks had only worsened that problem.
The sound of his pounding heart surged in his ears, eclipsing even the wind. The rest of the universe seemed to dissolve. His world became a tunnel of space devoid of all but a circle of canyon floor and the 1053 feet of empty air between him and it.
Hyperventilating, Vaughn had closed his eyes. For the third time, he had subvocalized a ten count, and also for the third time, his hands had refused to let go. They wouldn't release the rail.
Then he'd decided that the imagery was causing the balking, so Vaughn had turned to face the bridge. That way he wouldn't have the ice-inducing vision of his final resting place staring him in the face. But as his toes perched on the angle iron ledge, Vaughn had lost hold of the rail. His hands had slipped, their death grip failing him. At first, they had refused every order to release, and now the traitorous sons of bitches seemed to want to force the issue.
Vaughn should have been happy, should've been pleased that he'd been relieved of the responsibility for pulling this particularly sticky trigger. But instead, only one thought had entered the man's mind:
He wanted to live!
As if in slow motion, his arms had windmilled like Michael Phelps swimming while baked out of his gourd. Each time a hand touched the rail, its fingers had bounced off, finding no purchase.
Then his upper body had tilted earthward.
He was going to fall!
The rail was no longer within reach!
Vaughn had searched desperately for something he could grab. Under the bridge, a complex network of wires spanned the canyon. One of the thickest cables crossed six feet beneath him.
Careful not to push off, Vaughn had given up on his battle to grasp the handrail. He'd allowed his knees to slacken. The toes of his boots slipped from their steel perch. Gravity made its claim and took him. The bottom of the bridge flashed through Vaughn's peripheral vision, but his eyes remained locked on the rapidly approaching complex of cables. Just as his feet struck the main one, his hands grasped the two nearest vertical wires. The hard rubber soles of his boots squeaked on the shiny metal. His right hand got hold of its targeted cable, but the left—apparently still bent on destruction—flailed fruitlessly.
His inertia carried him out, away from the wires. Then, with another squeak, his left foot slipped off of the main cable, but his right hand had apparently decided it, too, wanted to live.
It held fast.
For an eternal second, Vaughn teetered on one foot. Then that boot had slipped off of the cable. His hand had slid down the vertical wire until it reached the bottom intersection. At the same moment, the other hand had finally rejoined the team. It grasped the main cable and stopped the fall, leaving Vaughn hanging with nothing but a thousand feet of air between the soles of his boots and the river below.
Presently, Vaughn screamed, "Shit, shit, shit!" again as he stared at the distant river.
The man closed his eyes. Through a force of will, Vaughn reined in his wheezing breath. The muscles in his overtaxed hands burned. He wouldn't be able to hold on much longer.
On his left, the cable arched downward, toward its anchor on that side of the canyon. Vaughn redirected the pendulous swinging of his legs from fore and aft to sideways. He tried to hook a heel over the wire. It slipped off with another rubbery squeak. Then with an echoing grunt, he thrust his left leg over the cable, successfully hooking a calf over it on the second desperate attempt.
He spent the next minute wrestling the rest of his body onto the perch. After catching his breath, he shimmied hand-over-hand toward the left anchor, always sure to maintain three points of contact. A fall this close to the edge would be much shorter, but just as fatal, with the likely addition of a long, agonizing death.
Yay! Vaughn thought wryly.
A few nervous and shaky interchanges later, he finally reached the catwalk. Not trusting his balance, Vaughn crossed the horizontal truss on hands and knees until he reached the point where it passed over the canyon's treed ledge. He swung his lower limbs over the edge and then dropped six feet to the ground. His exhausted legs gave out, crumpling under him. Vaughn collapsed into a laughing, crying mass of jiggling flesh. The laughter and even the tears felt cleansing.
After a few minutes, he rolled onto his back and stared at the drifting cotton ball clouds.
Vaughn held two extended middle fingers to the sky.
"I'm alive! I'm fucking alive!"
His arms dropped to the ground. As he lay there spread-eagle, tears rolled from the corners of his eyes.
Vaughn sighed. In a whisper, he added, "And it's not my fault, goddamn it."
Finally, he sat up and drew in a deep breath. Then he let it out in a long exhalation.
"Well, Captain Singleton, it's time to get busy living."
Chapter 14
Angela latched herself to the array arm's outermost structural member. At the outboard end of the support arm, the angular momentum of its slow, ninety-minute rotation generated just enough artificial gravity to cause the four-foot-wide roll of wire attached to her hip to hang feather-light by her boots.
The microgravity created an up reference, making the distant truss appear to be above Angela. Heart racing in response to the fresh dose of adrenaline pumping through her, the astronaut looked down and watched a universe worth of stars scroll beneath her hanging feet.
The rotating support arms were still making their once-per-orbit revolution. The minuscule friction produced at the truss's pivot point hadn't appreciably slowed them. Actually, from the sun's perspective, the arms weren't turning. To it, the station flipped end over end once per trip around the planet, while the solar array support arms always faced the sun. But that was an illusion of perspective. Here at the outboard end of that arm, Angela could barely feel it, but she knew that moving farther out from that center of rotation would increase the effect of that angular momentum. She was counting on it, actually. She reasoned that the angular momentum coupled with the differential gravity exerted across the length of the spooled out wire would keep it taut.
Now the horizon slid under her boots as the array arm's sedate rotation brought it parallel to the planet's surface.
"What do you think, Nate?" Angela said. "Is this going to work?"
Refusing to reveal his opinion, the little mouse remained mute—as he did on all subjects, save cheese.
"Blah, blah, blah, Nate. Do you ever shut up?"
An errant lock of hair drifted into Angela's right eye … again. She blew it out of the way. Then the astronaut unclipped the thick bundle of looped wire from her hip.
"Better hope this works, little buddy."
She looked at the four-foot-wide ring and nodded.
"I got the idea from an experiment NASA did back in ninety-six," she said to the voice recorder in Nate's spacesuit habitat. "During a Shuttle flight, astronauts deployed a long cable from the cargo bay to see if the wire would generate electricity as it cut through Earth's magnetic field, but it snapped before they finished spooling it out, so they thought it had failed. Most of the cable was lost to space, but when the scientists examined the frayed end that had returned with the Shuttle, they discovered that it had melted."
"The experiment hadn't failed, really. It had exceeded expectations. The wire created too much electricity, so it should work for the station, too."
She'd spent the last two days scavenging all of the recently bared wire from the station's truss, working long hours in her spacesuit. Now it was time to spool it out.
Initially, Angela had planned to brace herself against the array arm and sling the counterweight into space. However, the cable would likely get tangled, pull up short and then rebound right at her. Plus, she didn't know how much force the fully extended wire would exert. The astronaut had clamped the cable to the strut using some pretty robust hardware, but she worried that if she threw the line, and it didn't get tangled, it would hit the end of its reach wi
th enough inertia to rip that cable out of its mount and send the whole bundle off on its own new orbit.
Then she and Nate would get to experience a slow, agonizing death.
No, she needed to modulate the spooling out of the cable.
"Here goes nothing."
Angela released the massive wrench that she'd attached to the end to act as a counterweight. The wrench slowly drifted away from her. Without much effect, she tried to help the cable along with her gloved hand. It was like trying to push a wet noodle. The wire and its makeshift counterweight lazily unwound its way toward the west, behind the station.
As the array support arm continued to turn like the minute hand of a crazy ninety-minute clock, the cable's far end slowly inched below the horizon. In three-quarters of an hour, it would finish the earthward half of its turn, and this end of the structure would rise above the opposite horizon ahead of the station.
As she watched the slow, almost nonexistent progress of the wire, Angela began to worry that it wasn't going to work. It looked as if it had stopped, like it was just hanging there idly. Then her body twitched as she reached the end of her personal tether.
"Oh shit!" Angela screamed as she twisted around. Accustomed to weightlessness, she'd forgotten to hold onto her hard point. Now twisting on the end of the lanyard, Angela fought to hold the looped cable in her right hand while she tried and failed to reach the crossbar with the other.
She kept swinging back and forth like a slow-motion pendulum.
The astronaut glanced down toward the planet. For the first time in her career, Commander Brown gained a sudden fear of heights. If the tether failed now, she would be thrown clear of the station.
