Paul entered the command to stop all of the ship’s attitude control functions which successfully shut down thrusters one, two and three—but not number four.
Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. He thought.
“The thruster won’t shut down. It’s failed open for some reason. I’m going to try to slow the spin and boost altitude with the other thrusters.”
Gesling’s hand flew across the glass touch screen that controlled the ship’s functions with lightning speed. He shut off all the displays except for the ones showing the fuel levels in the thrusters he was about to use, the altimeter and the relative attitude. The four attitude control thrusters were situated around the center of the habitat’s cylinder at ninety-degree angles from each other, each had four nozzles, also separated from each other by ninety degrees. This gave the pilot the ability to control the orientation, or attitude, of the spacecraft by precisely firing the thrusters needed to roll, pitch, and yaw the craft as needed.
With thruster four firing continuously in the positive roll direction, Gesling would have to counteract the spin it was inducing by firing the other three thrusters in unison in the other direction to counter the acceleration the damaged thruster provided. He’d have to be careful to not overcorrect and start the ship tumbling in three directions simultaneously—a situation difficult to correct under the best of circumstances. He’d also have to watch the propellant levels to make sure there would be enough attitude control propellant to control the ship for the flight home. Most importantly, he had to buy himself some time and then get that damned stuck thruster turned off.
He began pulsing the number two thruster in the opposite direction; then numbers one and three, in that order, over and over, giving with each a small impulse bit that, taken together, should stop the ship’s roll. The altitude loss was more troubling. Without knowing precisely how much thrust was being used to push the ship downward, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to know which of the other thrusters to use, and when to use them, until the spinning stopped. Firing one of them at the wrong time could accelerate the movement toward the asteroid by mistake, making the situation much worse. For this reason, Gesling decided to stop the ship from spinning and then deal with the descent problem. He hoped he would have time to do that before the habitat hard-landed on the surface of Sutter’s Mill.
The number four thruster must have been firing so that it gave the ship a kick toward the asteroid and not purely along the ship’s rotational axis. This could be caused by two of the number four’s minithrusters simultaneously malfunctioning or by a break in the feed line, causing a purely random propellant leak. Gesling assumed it was the latter, given what little data he had.
The exact cause was no matter, except for the fact that unless he found a way to stop the thruster, it would totally deplete its fuel tank, leaving the ship with only whatever remained in the other three tanks for controlling the ship’s attitude. And each of those would be roughly thirty-three percent additionally depleted trying to slow the ship’s roll.
In only a few minutes, which to Gesling seemed like hours, the ship started to visibly slow its roll. The vibration stopped, causing Gesling to guess that the malfunctioning thruster’s propellant tank must be empty. By tapping a new firing sequence into the flight control computer, Gesling was able to bring the spinning to a stop.
“Paul, you’ve stopped the spin, and a good thing too. The tether is completely wrapped around the high gain antenna.” The voice in the radio was that of Mikhail.
“But you really need to stop the descent. At the rate you’re coming in, you’ll impact in no more than three or four more minutes. Hui and I are safely out of the way but if you crash, I don’t relish the thought of dying out here in my spacesuit.”
“Got it. I’m going to fire the numbers one and three thrusters now to give me some altitude. Let me know how I do,” Paul said, his voice not betraying the tension and fear that he was now feeling. It was the voice of training.
Gesling made a quick mental calculation and then commanded the two thrusters to fire. The thrusters were located on opposite sides of the habitat, and each orientated so that their exhaust would go toward Sutter’s Mill and propel the habitat up and away from it.
Gesling looked toward the radar altimeter and saw that his rate of descent was slowing, which was what he was trying to do. But he didn’t want the course reversal to happen too quickly lest the communications antenna with the tether wrapped around it be broken or damaged. What he wanted to do was to stop the descent and not begin an ascent. He wanted to stabilize the ship at whatever altitude it was in so that the tether could be safely removed from whatever it was entangled.
Too late, Gesling muttered as he heard a muffled thud and felt the ship briefly shudder. Something had broken or was.
“Shit! That’s not good,” he said to himself.
He switched the display from digital to analog mode. He hated seeing numbers click by. It didn’t give him a feel for the rate of change in the altitude the same way a moving needle or gauge did. The digitally created gauge replaced the numerical counter as he continued to pulse the small hundred-pound class thrusters, decreasing the total impulse, by decreasing the burn time, with each pulse.
The rate of the ship’s descent slowed to zero and remained there. Only then did Paul realize he was sweating like he’d run a marathon. The ship had lost more than half its initial altitude, but it was stable and not spinning or moving closer to the asteroid.
“Mikhail, this is Paul. I think I’ve got it stopped but I heard something snap. What do you see from out there?”
“Paul, you did great. But we have some work ahead of us. The tether is thoroughly tangled in one of the radiators and it looks like it snapped the high gain antenna off the hull. It’s still tangled in the tether so it won’t go anywhere. I think Hui and I can clear both, but not on this EVA. It’s going to take some time.”
“Unless you think the ship is in imminent danger, get back to your repair of the electric thruster on the asteroid. Fixing that is far more important than fixing the ship right now. I’ll run some diagnostics from in here and try to figure out what happened. Mission Control was yapping away trying to get my attention until the antenna snapped. Now there’s nothing. The telemetry they were seeing was probably nominal as we are at a four light-minute distance from Earth right now. I have no idea what they wanted. If I get a chance I’ll hit the playback. They don’t know we had a problem for another minute or two assuming the low gain telemetry feed is still working.”
“Comrade, it looks like from here the low gain antenna is gone. I don’t see it anywhere.”
“Well, then, they may have no idea we had a problem and if they did, then they might not know I was able to stop the descent in time and may think the we crashed.” Paul pulled up the telemetry feed transmission log on the touchscreen and noted where it terminated. The rate of decent was accelerating when the telemetry stopped transmitting. Mission Control back home would think they crashed.
“Sounds like you have your hands full up there. Don’t worry about us. We’ll get back to what we’re doing and let you know when we’re ready to come back in. But, Paul, do me one favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Please don’t drop the ship on our heads out here. For a few minutes, I thought we were going to have to ride this rock all the way back to Earth.”
* * *
Gary Childers was paying for 24/7 care of Carolyn O’Connor as she lay in her Lexington hospital bed in a coma. Despite the time she’d been unconscious, the doctors told Gary that she still had a chance of recovering. She wasn’t totally unresponsive—her pupils and ears responded to stimulation and she was observed to react reflexively to stimulation. Childers visited her regularly, as did Bill Stetson and several of those who worked with her at Space Excursions. As time wore on, though, the time between visits grew.
The night shift nurse, Krystol Russell, was in the middle of her shift and changing the u
rine collection bag attached to Carolyn’s catheter. Krystol’s friends and family often chided her about her chosen profession, asking her how she could stand taking care of otherwise helpless patients, many of whom might never be able to thank her or even know who had helped take care of them in their time of need. She minded the chiding and the questions more than she did her actual work. She became a certified nursing assistant because she wanted to help people and to make a difference. And going to school for four years to become a nurse was out of the question, at least for now. Ever since she could remember, she was rushing to her momma’s side when a younger sibling had a cut or scrape, assisting in the cleaning of the wound and application of the band-aid. It was a natural thing for her to attend a community college and become a CNA after graduating high school. Here she was, taking care of a very pretty lady in her early forties that had almost been killed by a shooter. She didn’t know Carolyn, but she knew that some very important people wanted her very well cared for.
She reached down to remove the bag, which first meant removing some tape that affixed the bag to Carolyn’s leg. Carefully peeling back the tape so as to not damage the now-sensitive and soft skin of her leg—a product of being bedridden for months with only periodic adjustments to prevent bed sores—when she heard Carolyn draw a deep breath. At first she was alarmed, thinking that something was causing her patient to be in pain and she looked around to make sure that none of the medical equipment affixed to her had been inadvertently bumped. The IV was still in place, as were the blood oxygen monitors and other diagnostics. Krystol sighed and went back to her task of removing the now-filled urine bag.
She paused. There was something different. Looking quickly back from her work to her patient, she saw that Carolyn’s eyes were wide open and looking around the room. Krystol nearly tripped and dropped the collection bag as she rushed to the side of her patient and pressed the hospital bed’s call button.
“Welcome back, Miss Carolyn. I’m Krystol and I’m here to take care of you,” she said in a soft, soothing voice to her now-awake patient.
Krystol could see that Carolyn wanted to say something, but all that came out of her mouth was unintelligible gibberish. Her patient hadn’t been able to speak for months and even though she was no longer intubated, her mouth and throat were undoubtedly dry and uncomfortable from disuse. She leaned closer.
“Miss Carolyn, I can’t understand you. Take it easy. You’re going to be okay and I just called for the doctor. We’re taking care of you.”
O’Connor tilted her head toward her nurse and said, “Where is Paul?”
CHAPTER 23
Mikhail and Hui returned from their seven-hour EVA with trepidation. Mikhail had bad news to report about the nonfunctioning thruster on Sutter’s Mill, but he was substantially more worried about whatever news Gesling was going to have about the ship. He and Hui shed their spacesuits quickly and joined Gesling, who was floating in front of the cooking station. Gesling didn’t say a word to them as they entered.
Paul handed them their drink containers, freshly filled with instant iced tea, and started the conversation by providing a status of the ship. The sound of his voice was somber.
“The number four thruster is completely out of commission and I had to eat into the reserve propellant on the other three to stop our rotation and the descent. I don’t know if there will be enough to keep the ship in a stable attitude on the way home. I’m pretty sure spinning up the habitat will eat up our fuel reserves.”
Mikhail and Hui both knew what that meant. If the ship couldn’t be pointed in the right direction every time they fired their engines, then they couldn’t target the ship to move in the direction they needed to get back to Earth.
“And we’ve lost communication with Earth. Without the high-gain antenna, there’s no way to let them know we’re still alive out here.” Paul shrugged his shoulders, which felt weird to him in microgravity. “We need to fix that ASAP.”
“What about replacing the low-gain antenna? We could put together a very simple Yagi or a makeshift dish with a dipole and use it to at least send a message and let them know we’re okay?” Hui suggested. “Rykov, you’re the electrical engineer. You can build an antenna out just about anything, I bet.”
“Absolutely,” the Russian engineer agreed.
“We can, but we’ll have to burn attitude control fuel to do it. Remember that everything out here is in motion and we can’t point any smaller antenna we rig up back at Earth without constantly adjusting the ship to direct it. The high gain antenna was gimbaled so it could track the Earth and point itself. The low gain antenna can’t.”
“So if we let them know we’re okay now, then we’ll use up some of the fuel that we will need later on to make sure we are okay and don’t get lost in space somewhere on the way home,” Mikhail said.
“That sums it up. We need to fix the thruster and get this asteroid on a new trajectory. Once they see that, they’ll know we were successful and still alive.”
“Or that we lived long enough to finish our mission.”
“Yep,” Gesling agreed.
Mikhail, Paula and Hui silently sipped their drinks, looking at each other for another ninety seconds before Mikhail spoke.
“The control electronics in the thruster are totally fried. And I think whatever shorted it out also caused damage to the cathode. The entire assembly is useless. I need to use the flight spare we brought with us and hope that the problem wasn’t a fundamental design issue. The spare is a duplicate of the one that failed and if the problem is not random, then it, too, might fail.”
“Can you replace it and untangle the tether from around the radiator array in the same spacewalk?” asked Gesling.
“I cannot. Replacing the unit will take every minute of at least two more all-day spacewalks. It wasn’t designed to be repaired or replaced and that means it will take me some time to get the job done. If I damage the replacement unit while installing it, then we will have real trouble,” Mikhail said.
“And if that tether breaks or jams the radiator, we won’t make it home for sure,” said Gesling.
“Hui can untangle the tether while I replace the thruster. I can do it by myself.”
“Are you okay with that, Hui? I could go out and help, but had I not been on the ship before when something went nuts we’d be in a very bad situation.”
“Absolutely,” she replied. “I think it wise for you to stay on the ship.”
“That’s it, then. We have our plan. Let’s get some rest and back to it.”
“One moment, comrades,” Rykov said.
“Yes?”
“Well, the transmitters should still be functioning. They are modern software defined radios. We could put a simple omnidirectional dipole antenna on them and start sending out signals. It is quite likely that with our disrupted communications that NASA will point its Deep Space Network of radio telescopes at us. They could still detect the Voyager spacecraft’s weak signals even after they left the solar system using the big dish in Puerto Rico.”
“Of course NASA will do that.” Paul knew that their mission was the most important one mankind had going and all eyes and ears would be on them. “How long will that take to rig up?”
“A day or so inside then a couple hours outside.”
“Fifty-two hours we don’t have until that engine is up and running and pushing that asteroid away from hitting Earth,” Paul said.
“Perhaps, I can rig the antenna during downtime over the next couple of days,” Rykov added.
“I can emplace it,” Hui added.
“We will do that, but not now. Engine first.” Paul made a command decision. “Back burner it and let’s get some sleep.”
* * *
Evgeni Golov was asleep in the Moscow apartment he rented for his mistress. After an evening at the symphony and a late-night stop for dessert at her favorite restaurant, they had made their way to her apartment and hurriedly made love. The act itself was almost perfunct
ory, making Golov wonder if his relationship with his mistress was getting as predictable as with his wife. But the thought was only fleeting because a wave of overwhelming tiredness was not far behind and he quickly fell asleep, with his mistress’s head gently placed in the crook of his left arm.
He was roused from a deep and satisfying sleep by the ringing of his cell phone. The ring tone was not what he recalled setting; it sounded like one of those terrible new songs so beloved by his teenage daughter. As he fumbled to answer, he realized she had probably taken his phone and changed all sorts of its settings the last time he was at home with his family. Elena, his mistress for the last five years, stirred but didn’t awaken as he finally found and answered the phone.
“Yes?”
“Evgeni? This is Makariy. The Americans have failed. We just learned that their ship crashed into the asteroid and they are most likely all dead.”
The news caused Golov to become instantly awake.
“And the asteroid?” he asked.
“They didn’t have time to repair or replace the thruster before the crash. Its course is unaltered.”
“Are you at the Institute?” Golov asked, already reaching for his shirt from the floor beside the bed. He glanced only fleetingly at his mistress with little concern that he was about to run off. Important men often had to make hasty exits. Wives would sometimes complain, but mistresses had no say in the matter.
“Yes. You need to get here as quickly as possible. You know what we have to do.”
“Yes, yes, of course. So you have the approvals required?”
Elena stirred as Golov switched on the light. He motioned for her to remain quiet.
“President Lazarev was informed and gave his consent. He intends to have a press conference and announce our plans to intercept it.”
“I can be there in an hour.”
Elena, now also fully awake sat up in the bed, not making any effort to cover herself in the process. She slipped from the bed and began gathering Golov’s remaining clothes into a pile near the foot of the bed, presumably to make it easier for him to find them.
On to the Asteroid Page 14
