“Paul, I understand what you are doing up there. I mean, you had to do this. It had to be you. There is nothing you could have done for me here and I know you are doing all you can do out there.”
“Oh, my God,” he said through his teeth, holding back his sobs.
“You can’t be sad. You can’t be angry. I want you to come home, baby. I love you.”
“I love you too!” He touched the screen accidentally pausing the video. “Oh shit.” He started it back.
“But if you don’t make it back, you can’t feel guilty. I will not allow that. You are doing what you have to do and what nobody else but you can do. So do it. Do it with all your heart and be proud to do so. Do it for humanity. Do it for, well, do it for me, Paul.”
“I will, baby.” Tears stuck to the corners of his eyes. He wiped at them causing them to ball up and float away in the microgravity.
“I love you. I will always love you. Know that. Now go do what you do.” With that Carolyn got up and walked out of view of the camera. Paul noticed a bag attached to her waist and what appeared to be drainage tubes poking out from underneath her blouse. He wasn’t sure what that was about, but he suspected they hadn’t given him complete details about her health status. But she was up and walking around and she was alive.
It was just like her. She wasn’t feeling guilty or allowing anybody else to. She knew that Paul had to do a job and she was telling him to do it and there was no need to feel guilty about the outcome—whatever it may be.
Paul stopped crying. He replayed the message a few more times before he drifted off to sleep whispering to himself at the end of the video each time it played.
“I love you too, baby.”
CHAPTER 52
“In order for this to work right, we’ll have to take the bottom booms off and mount them on the surface of the asteroid or elsewhere to the ship.” Paul pointed at the 3D representation of the ship on the viewscreen. “These two here will have to be removed.”
“I see.” Hui nodded that she understood.
“Wait, Paul.” Rykov pointed at a spot on the side of the Tamaroa where there were several bare struts. “Why not just mount them here and here? It would be way easier to bolt them down on the Tamaroa than to figure out a way to hammer them into that surface out there.”
“Good. Make that happen as soon as I finish my last pass over the ore veins of Sutter’s Mill A this morning,” Paul said. Since the rock had finally broken free overnight they now had two asteroids. They were calling the largest chunk Sutter’s Mill A and the one a third the size of the other Sutter’s Mill B.
“Roger that, comrade,” Rykov said, as the engineer started scribbling at a touchpad with his finger. Paul could tell that he already had an idea of how to install and implement the magnets on the new location. He was an excellent engineer.
“As soon as I’m done with the final magnetization run over A, we need to dismantle these two magnets and move them. Then we’ll make one last video call to Earth, park on the back side, and tie her down,” Paul explained, but they already understood the plan. Astronauts were famous for repeating the checklists over and over just to be certain they were following all the steps and in the right order.
“Once we are tied down, I’ll use the CTV as a low-gain relay antenna,” Hui said. “We’ll have to figure out a schedule for communications.”
“Paul, I could rig a higher-gain antenna if you think we need video,” Rykov said as he chewed through his morning meal bar. Paul preferred the pressurized breakfast drinks and the eggs. The meal bars made him feel like he was eating candy for breakfast. And he really didn’t like what they did to his bowel movements. Going number two in microgravity was difficult enough as it was.
“Maybe later, if there is time or a need,” Paul ordered. “Right now, we focus on the day’s work. What is your estimate on how long it will take to reconfigure the magnets?”
“I was timelining that last night,” Rykov answered as he let a piece of his bar float in front of his mouth. “I’m guessing somewhere around four hours each. I’ll need an hour or so between each EVA to rest and recover before going back at it. So nine to ten hours.”
“It will take me four hours this morning. That’s downtime for the two of you.” Paul didn’t like wasting time. He looked at the countdown clock. “Two days and two hours. We’re cutting it close.”
“It doesn’t have to be complete downtime,” Hui said.
“How so, Hui?”
“We could either sleep or we could work on the high-gain antenna problem,” Hui explained.
“I can’t sleep.” Rykov chomped at various bits of floating yellow and chocolate brown foods floating in front of him. “I’m wide awake for the rest of the day.”
“Hui?”
“I honestly am not sleepy either.”
“Well, then, I changed my mind.” Paul slurped at his empty coffee tube. “The two of you work on the antenna issue while I’m finishing up the magnetization of Sutter’s Mill A.”
“Sounds like a plan, comrade!”
* * *
“Sounds like a plan, Gary.” Bill looked around the cockpit of the Dreamscape, finishing out a preflight simulation. There was a flashing yellow indicator icon on the touchscreen to the left, but it wasn’t an emergency. He’d check it later. “I’m all set here.”
“So, the Dreamscape can handle the mission?” Gary asked.
“Come on, Gary, you know as well as I do that we designed the Dreamscape to do ISS resupply and rescue if we needed to.” Bill tapped at the yellow icon just to read it. The toilet door was open. He chuckled to himself.
“There is no time to get another rocket up there to evacuate the station. Something went wrong in the schedule and they won’t make their launch window. So, of course I volunteered us to go and get the three astronauts that are up there.” Gary smiled. “For a price.”
“Why don’t they just evac on the Soyuz capsules they have up there?” Bill asked.
“They can, but the Dreamscape is a much cheaper option for them.” Gary smiled again. “Cheaper is relative of course.”
“So that moves our timetable up by a couple of days?” Bill asked.
“We need to be ready to go by tomorrow afternoon. NASA is working the orbital dynamics with the ground control team here. We’ll have all of that figured out in the next couple of hours.” Gary looked at his watch. “That doesn’t give us a lot of time.”
“What about our paying customers?”
“Oh, they’re on their way here and should arrive in a few hours. We just need to plan for a longer trip and for more people. This will be a good dress rehearsal for carrying a full crew to the Moon. It is short notice, though, and because of that we had some back out on us.” Gary frowned a bit. Or at least as far as Bill could tell it was as close to a frown as he’d ever seen Gary make. “Four of them have backed out and we only had seven to start with. So, we’ll have you, me, three customers, and three astronauts. We are running three short, assuming I sit in the copilot’s seat. And our flight has now gone from three days to nine. I’ve already got the crew working the timeline and supply chain. You want me to have Becca flown out to see you off?”
“No. She’s going to want to stay with Carolyn and I don’t think we need to move her again yet. I’ll just video chat with her later about it. I suspect I’ll be too busy to spend any time with her anyway.” Bill chewed at his bottom lip a bit. “Any ideas on Paul? What is NASA saying?”
“There seems to be nothing can be done.” Gary cleared his throat and for a moment there Bill thought he was going to break, but he didn’t. “There is no way to get to him and he has no way to slow down to get to us. I know you know this better than I do, but NASA has spent all their resources at this point. They have no other arrows left in their quiver.”
“There just seems like there has to be something more we could do.” Bill could not stand the thought of leaving an astronaut crew to float free in space until they died
of dehydration or starved or ran out of air. He understood making a sacrifice to save humanity or even some of humanity but it was a hard sacrifice to deal with when it was so torturous. And when it was his friend.
“I’m all for it, Bill,” Gary told him. “If you can come up with even the craziest idea, I’ll move Heaven and Earth to make it happen.”
“I’ve got nothing,” Bill sadly replied.
CHAPTER 53
The cast had made the long drive in the heavy traffic difficult. Although it had been a few days since the impact, travel out of the Los Angeles area was still moving at a turtle’s pace. Zhi Feng had been living on fast food, coffee, and painkillers for almost twenty-seven hours. It had taken that long to make the two-hour drive from southern LA to Nevada. Feng’s route had been circuitous at best, and he had been forced to travel all the way south to Anaheim and then turn north and east to San Bernardino before he could get back on course toward Nevada. He had stopped in Anaheim at a hospital.
After spending the night in the hospital and having seen the whereabouts and plans of Space Excursions on television, he now had a plan and a schedule. The damned traffic was not helping. Due to damaged gas lines or power lines or accidents or twenty other reasons, his route was being continuously altered by public safety, rescue workers, and the police. He did his best to avoid the police when he could manage.
The four-wheel-drive pickup truck he had acquired closer to ground zero had served him well. It was the only vehicle not damaged off the highway as he had made his escape from the FBI agents following the impact of the asteroid fragment. For whatever reason, it was sitting running at a stoplight with the door open as if it had been left there just for him. So he had taken it. There were several other vehicles crashed in front and behind it and Feng had been forced to push them out of the way with the truck, denting the front bumper and quarter panel and tearing the grill in places. But the damage had only been cosmetic, because the truck had been functioning flawlessly throughout the journey.
Zhi Feng finished off his coffee and downed another pain pill as he exited at the Nevada Spaceport. He could see the Space Excursions hangar in the distance. It was by far the largest of the newer buildings along the runway. But Feng was exhausted and in pain. He wanted to get himself cleaned up and rest from his journey but was concerned that he wouldn’t have time. The nurse had cleaned the dried blood off his face in the emergency room but it was still on his clothes. He was glad the nurse hadn’t realize that it wasn’t his blood. His face was bruised yellow and blue and scratched up enough from his fight with agent Reed that having more blood on his face wasn’t out of place. Besides, most of the walking wounded who had found their way to the hospital had been battered, scratched, cut, and bloody. Feng had fit right in. Now he needed to figure out how to fit right into the Space Excursions hangar.
As far as the information he’d been able to gather from the television and the radio during his long arduous trek to the spaceport, the Dreamscape would be taking off within an hour or so. Zhi Feng knew that he had to move quickly if he was going to exact his revenge in time.
CHAPTER 54
“Magnet one is in place and connected, Paul,” Hui announced over the radio. “What is our clock time?”
“It took you over seven hours to do that one,” Paul answered Hui. “Mikhail, your estimate was off by nearly a factor of two. It took twice as long as we planned. That puts us up against the clock big time.”
“Get in here and start your rest cycle now.” Paul adjusted the activities timeline schedule on his touch pad for the longer modification time. The schedule still had them about twenty-two hours ahead of the eight-day mark. That was a decent margin but there were still a whole lot of tasks to be accomplished. Once the magnets were modified, then it would take the entire crew a good eight hours to tie the ship down as planned. Add a sleep cycle and an eating cycle and an hour or so for suiting up and down there was only about four hours to spare. Paul didn’t like cutting it that close.
* * *
“I hate cutting things so close, Gary.” Bill Stetson told his boss as he was doing the final checklists on the Dreamscape. “Alright, we need to get the passengers suited up and briefed, and start loading for launch. We are at T-minus, uh,” he looked at his watch.
“Relax, Bill, we are on schedule,” Gary assured him. “The NASA clock has us airborne in T-minus six hours and counting. Give or take a few minutes.”
“This is rocket science, Gary. We don’t ‘give or take’ anything for granted. We must be more precise.”
“Well, Bill, then just be more precise is all I know,” Gary told him. “The customers are paid up in full and are in the briefing room ready to suit up.”
“Good, then get in there and suit up with them. I’ll be along in about ten minutes.” Bill turned back to the touchscreen console. The piston pumps on the oxidizer tank had been yellow and were showing a lower than usual head pressure. “I still need to purge the pressure heads for the LOX pumps.”
* * *
“That’s it. Break’s over, guys.” Paul floated into the crew habitat. Rykov was sound asleep. He wasn’t sure if Hui had been asleep or not. She almost instantly responded to his presence.
“Roger that, Paul. I’ll start suiting up,” she said.
“Mikhail, time to get up,” Paul said a little bit louder. There was no response. “Mikhail! Time to wake up.”
There was still no response. Paul banged his hand against the bulkhead several times.
“Bozhe moi!” Rykov cursed several strings of Russian obscenities. “Good thing you two do not understand Russian!” He cursed some more.
“Time to get up, Mikhail.”
“Alright, alright. I will get suited up just stop making such noise.”
“We are cutting it very close, you two. I don’t like our margin. If there is a way to make things move smoother on this EVA we need to do so.” Paul thought but didn’t say, if we’re going to die we should make it worth something and save a few million lives.
What he did say was, “Let’s move. The clock is ticking.”
“Affirmative,” Rykov grunted as he floated from his private area in his LCVGs with a meal bar in his mouth.
CHAPTER 55
The two businesses on either side of Space Excursions were smaller and slightly older, but they were the same construction as everything else at the spaceport. They were tall, white sheet-metal buildings with large hangar doors on the runway-facing side. The only security would be that you had to go through the road-facing side to get through the airport fencing. In honesty, the Mojave spaceport was nothing more than a runway where spacecraft flew into and back from space with the apparent ease of a commercial airline. The actual number of true spacecraft that had launched from there could be counted on a single hand. And not all of those had actually made it to space. The Dreamscape was the only one that had done it repeatedly and had made it all the way to the Moon and back.
Zhi Feng passed the Space Excursions entrance and parked the truck two buildings down. While that building didn’t look abandoned, it also didn’t look as if there was anybody inside it at the moment. He would break in through there. He used the handle of Agent Reed’s pistol to break the glass. Scanning about to make certain nobody had noticed him, he then reached through and unlocked the door.
The building was filled with derelict rocket parts, composite wing structures, and machine tools. Were Feng not on a specific mission he might have been interested in the commercial rocket memorial. As it was, he was centrally focused and very close to his target.
The back room was a hangar with two bay doors chained together and padlocked. There was a standard exit door just to the right of the hangar doors. Feng pushed at the handle and the door opened, letting in the bright desert sunlight, almost flash blinding him for an instant.
After letting his eyes adjust, he stepped outside and turned toward Space Excursions. The hangar doors were open and he could see the nose of the Dr
eamscape protruding just beyond the hangar exit out onto the taxiway. Two steps further and he saw Bill Stetson walking down the loading steps of the spacecraft. Zhi Feng hugged the metal wall of the hangar between himself and Space Excursions.
There were no security guards and no fences. He could see another prototype spacecraft several hangars down just sitting on the taxiway with the doors open. These stupid American commercial space companies were too lax in security. Feng could do pretty much whatever he wanted to with these spacecraft and nobody could stop him.
There was a mockup of some sort of spacecraft sitting on the pavement before the hangar he was currently hiding in front of, but there were no people milling about. There was nobody there to stop him. Feng saw his opportunity. As soon as Stetson was out of the Space Excursions spacecraft he would make his move.
Zhi Feng took a couple of slow even breaths and carefully made his way to the edge of the open Space Excursions hangar. He leaned his head around and saw Stetson going into a door at the front of the hangar. As far as he could tell, the ship had been left unattended. Feng took a quick breath and bolted for the steps leading into the spacecraft. He stumbled several times, dragging his cast as best he could. Once he made it to the bottom of the steps he grabbed the handrail and pulled himself up and into the ship.
The little ship wasn’t at all what Zhi Feng remembered it to be. It looked more like a luxury jet with seven seats than it did the spacecraft that had been to the Moon and rescued him and his crew. He surmised that his memories of that embarrassing and humiliating rescue were clouded or they had upgraded the ship. He poked his gun through the cockpit door but there was nobody in the two-seat control center of the spacecraft. He turned and made his way back, looking under seats and out the windows.
Once he reached the rear of the ship he found the galley door and opened it. The door led to a small flight kitchen on one side and a toilet and shower on the other. On the right side of the room was an airlock. Feng played with the controls for a moment and managed to cycle the airlock. He recognized the international docking ring design on the outer door. It looked like as good a hiding place as any for the time being.
On to the Asteroid Page 27
