“Great. Well, let’s hope it’s not too late. What’s our show time?” Might as well get back to business.
They agreed to meet in crew ops at seven o’clock. Checking his watch, Tom figured that would give him just enough time to grab a bite with Elise and head off. Maybe she’d be up for a quick trip to their favorite cheap Chinese joint.
He reluctantly called Kirby, who promptly let fly a torrent of profanity in an over-the-top tirade. Expecting him to vent and hang up without even waiting for a “yes sir,” Tom sat the phone down and straightened up his workbench as his boss continued to rant…something about going back to flying puddle-jumpers and screwing up one-car parades.
25
Austral Clipper
Ryan swam into the cockpit and closed the door behind him. Tom was still in the left seat, running system checks for what was likely the fifth or sixth time. Wade floated by the window on the opposite side, then clumsily pulled away to clear the copilot’s seat. Still getting used to freefall, he pushed off too hard and banged into the overhead panel. Swearing, he rubbed his forehead and continued pushing away, more cautiously now.
“Watch yourself,” Ryan warned. “Soon as you think you’ve got zero-g figured out, it’ll surprise you. Makes a cramped space like this feel bigger than it really is. It’ll help if you go out in the cabin where there’s room to play around, get your space legs.”
Wade was still rubbing the fresh knot on his forehead. It was hard to tell if Ryan was serious through all of the gyrating confusion in the cockpit. He managed to pull himself down into the jumpseat and snapped the lap belt into place. “You’re just trying to get rid of me,” he finally said. “Thanks, but I usually tend to learn things the hard way. Could I trouble you for my camera?”
Ryan reached up on the glare shield and found a compact digital camera, floating with its strap looped around a handhold. He gently pushed it off in Wade’s direction. “Nice rig. Sightseeing?”
“It’s a good hobby when you travel as much as I do. And there’s not much else to do for now.”
“We’re sure not going anywhere soon,” Ryan agreed as he pulled himself down into the seat. “And I’m serious—get out and swim around a little.” He handed Tom a clipboard with a handwritten inventory list.
Tom caught it in midair and looked over the tally, comparing it against his own notes. “Food and water?” he asked.
“We had a full catering load for the next leg so food’s no problem. Lots of soda and juice, but water needs to be rationed. And Marcy locked down the booze.”
“Good idea. How’s everyone doing?” he asked. “Does she have a handle on them, or are we going to have to start taking watches back there?”
“I can help with that,” Wade said, hoping it would also calm his own nerves. “You’ll need help managing the boss. He’s bound to get testy, especially if the scotch is locked up.”
“Roger that,” Ryan agreed sourly. “For now Marcy’s keeping them busy organizing the consumables, and she’s still checking out the flyaway kit,” he said, referring to a supply container strapped into the cargo bay. “There may be some useful stuff in there.”
“Hard to imagine what that could be, but it’s still worth doing,” Tom agreed. “So what’s her take on life support?” he asked, looking up at the environmental controls on the overhead. “Dispatch figured about five days worth.”
“That good?” Ryan asked. “Marcy figured three days, but she wasn’t sure what was left in the oxidizer tanks.” If the bypass valves were still working, their pressurization system could draw breathable air from the same liquid oxygen tanks used to feed the engines.
“Assuming we don’t have pressure escaping somewhere…who knows? I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a consideration during cold-soak.” It was part of the flight test regimen—no one could really know how systems would behave after long hours at extreme altitude until they actually went out and did it.
Ryan mulled that over and began paging through a systems manual on his tablet. “Hadn’t thought of that one. I was more worried about boil-off.” Even with the best insulation, the harsh heating from direct sunlight in space would begin to evaporate the super-cold liquid oxygen.
“We’ll use those tanks first,” Tom decided. “Plumbing down there’s good for a few hours in vacuum, but who knows if it’ll hold for a week?” Much less five, he left unsaid. Penny had just sent him her rough calculations of their orbital period. He didn’t have the resources to check himself, but it had sounded about right.
“Guess we’ll find out,” Ryan said. “If Penny and Charlie have a team together, they ought to come up with some workarounds.”
“Who’s that?” Wade asked.
“Flight control staff,” Tom explained. “Charlie’s our lead dispatcher, he’s been with the airline long before us rocket-jockeys showed up. Sharp guy. Soon as we started this program, he went back to school on his own dime just to get smart on spaceflight physics. Penny is one of our pilots, used to fly the Shuttle. We keep a pilot in the control center just in case, and it was her turn this week.”
“So she drew the lucky straw?” Wade said. “Good to know they haven’t forgotten about us.”
They floated in silence for the next few minutes, silently watching the darkened Earth below. A moving map on the center panel showed them crossing over South America. They were in night, so the only light came from scattered clusters of towns and villages. Toward the distant horizon, the atmosphere’s thin sheath glowed faintly from the lights of larger cities. Towering thunderstorms were visible whenever lightning erupted inside them, like flash bulbs swathed in cotton.
The panel lights were turned down low and filled the cockpit with a red hue to preserve their night vision. As they passed over the southern Atlantic, their eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The universe appeared to unfold before them. Wade was dazzled by the steady glow of innumerable stars. Unseen details that had been overwhelmed by sunlight were now in full view. He found it strange to see them this way: pinpricks of light and wisps of color scattered across a deep, impenetrable blackness. “My God,” he breathed, pressing his face to a side window.
“That’s about right,” Tom said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s the right sentiment. That’s God’s view you’re getting.”
Wade didn’t—couldn’t—respond. The thought gave him chills, faced with the immense reality unfolding before them. Space had depth now, a dimension he’d never considered while earthbound. He finally worked up a weak reply, which even he found unconvincing: “I can even see colors.”
Perhaps it was a good idea to take their invitation to explore the main cabin. He opened the door and lunged forward. Once again, he pushed too hard and went careening off into a bulkhead, swearing as he bounced away from it.
The spectacle drew a quiet laugh from Ryan after their guest was safely out of earshot. Turning back, he found Tom stone-faced. “Sorry skipper,” he said. “Always fun to watch the new guys get their space legs.”
“It is,” he admitted. “But there’s something else we need to talk about. Shut the door.”
26
Denver
Penny waited with as much patience as she could muster for the ad-hoc Tiger Team to return; they’d been out for the past three hours in a mad scramble for information.
Their desks were littered with tables and charts. A ring binder filled with emergency contact numbers lay open on a shelf above an array of monitors. Charlie Grant was pulling off his headset at the flight control station as she approached. He stretched tiredly and rubbed the stiffness from his neck. Already on duty for the past twelve hours, and there was now no end in sight.
We’ll have to get some cots in here, she thought. “What’s the word from the crew?”
“We’ve got good radios at least. I was worried about that, but SatCom voice is keeping up pretty well”.
“Did the crew finish their inventories ye
t?”
“They say five days air including bypass feed from the LOX tanks,” he reported with evident relief. “More than enough food and water to last that long.”
Penny barely heard his last sentence. She frowned and twirled another loose strand of hair, an old habit when she had to solve problems while running against the clock. Real-time thinking, they called it. She looked back up at the orbital period and compared it to her own notes. Five days…that’s barely enough. And these guys don’t understand that yet. They think we’ve got plenty of time. The operations team was used to making snap decisions, often having to judge incomplete information to prevent disruptions from cascading through the system. Even having a few hours to work a single problem was almost a luxury to them.
“Penny?”
She snapped back, not realizing how lost in thought she’d become…or that she wasn’t immune to the same fatigue that dogged the rest of the team.
“Distracted myself. Go ahead.”
“I said the other consumables are no problem. There’s a week’s worth of food if they keep it to two meals per day.”
Penny now looked him squarely in the eyes. “What about power?” she asked. “Sounds like you’re saving the worst for last.”
Charlie glanced back at his figures, conveniently avoiding her glare. “Not exactly, but it ain’t good. We need to talk about this one.”
She relaxed. Throttle back, hot dog. They aren’t used to this kind of stuff. “Sorry, there’s still a lot going on,” she said, recalling a tense conversation she’d just finished with Hammond. “I’ll brief you when everyone’s here. Tell me about power.”
“You know there’s nothing left to run the APU,” he pointed out, referring to the auxiliary power unit, a small gas turbine which ran on the same propellant as the engines. Once they’d burned dry, it too was out of commission.
“Figured as much,” she sighed. “What about fuel cells and batteries?”
“Batteries aren’t in use yet. We’re saving those until the last minute. They’re still good for eight hours depending on how cold it gets up there.” The batteries could power enough essential systems for a single pilot to land in an emergency. “Fuel cells are the long pole in the tent.”
She knew where this was going. Fuel cells created electricity through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, and had been used to power spacecraft for decades. Their waste product was pure water, so it was a nearly ideal energy source. The limitation was that they had to carry the necessary gasses with them—which meant drawing from the same oxygen supply.
“So, let’s talk about fuel cells,” she sighed, settling into a chair.
Charlie looked back at his notes. “At current power, they’ll burn up all the O2 in another sixty-three hours.”
“And does that time account for breathable air?”
“Yes. So at that rate, they actually have less than three days.”
Penny rubbed her temples. It made her appear frustrated, but she was actually nursing a rapidly-developing migraine. “Three days,” she groaned. “They need more. You said they had a little over sixty hours at emergency power, right?”
“Right. The usual non-essentials are shut down.”
“Then that’s your first task. They don’t need all the bells and whistles going right now, do they?”
“Guess not.” He was getting the idea. “They’ve already got most of the lights off, and the copilot’s control system is off. They could isolate an electrical bus and save a fuel cell that way.”
“Turn off everything but the backup system. And shut down one of the AC compressors. They don’t need the whole air exchange system running for seven people. Have them take cabin pressure differential down to minimum. If you say they’ve got five day’s breathable air, then that has to become our measuring stick at all costs.”
She looked up to see the rest of the group had filtered in and were listening. Good. I won’t have to make the same speech twice.
“Five days is not nearly as much time as it sounds like,” she announced to the team. “We know where things stand up there, now we have to start working on rescue and recovery plans.”
One of the maintenance techs was incredulous. “Recovery? I hate to break it to you, but we’ll be recovering this bird with a shovel,” he exclaimed.
“Wrong!” Penny banged a fist on the console. “As long as they have time, we have options. But if we don’t get moving soon, those people are dead.”
That earned her some surprised looks. Where was she heading with this? Get moving on what?
They found out soon enough. Her explanation was met with even more disbelief.
27
Austral Clipper
Wade had experienced quite enough of weightlessness so far. They weren’t kidding—the cramped cockpit fooled your senses. But getting out into the open passenger cabin was too much space, thank you very much. The nearly-empty cabin didn’t help. His head swam from the unrelenting sensation of openness. Before long his stomach was out of synch with his inner ears, and he had an overwhelming urge to vomit.
Nobody knows who’ll get spacesick, he’d always heard. Still, he couldn’t help but think those guys up front were halfway expecting him to puke once he got out in the open.
He’d at least managed to find a barf bag just in time, then strapped into a window seat towards the back of the cabin. There was at least some small resemblance of up-and-down motion here. The pilots had set up a “barbecue roll,” slowly turning the Clipper around its long axis to evenly distribute the sun’s heat. It had an added benefit of creating the barest sensation of gravity along the outer walls of the cabin, as centrifugal force eventually pulled any loose objects outward. Not nearly enough to walk around on, it at least helped his frame of reference if he remained still.
So Wade floated beneath the straps, trying to feel seated. So many others had found it to be a joyous experience, but he couldn’t find anything to get too excited about yet. The view outside was the real attraction to his mind. Until now. They won’t be able to give tickets away after this fiasco.
He had briefly spoken with Colin Magrath, and the unfortunate narrative was already taking shape in his boss’s mind: a revolutionary spacecraft, lots of public interest, the airline glory days live again. The Feds mostly looked the other way, since Hammond had been trying to build cheap access to space that Uncle Sam could benefit from. Throw in a veteran pilot nearing retirement, who tries to set some records with the boss’s blessing and ends up cratering the whole shebang instead…with an internationally-known media baron aboard for good measure. Looking across the aisle, he saw Whitney buckled in and busily typing away on a tablet strapped to her seat tray. So Colin was already keeping her busy on the background work. Maybe that was a good thing, considering the circumstances. But his news outlets would be on this like a pack of wild dogs very soon.
Terrific story…hope I’m around to see it in print.
He cinched the harness down tighter; it was the only way to feel settled back in his seat. Once past the initial wonder of weightlessness, it was surprising how much one could miss the sensation of collapsing back into a soft chair. Or a bed, for that matter. It had been a long day even before he had clambered aboard hours ago.
They were coming back into daylight now; every 45 minutes there was a sunrise or sunset. Earth was rolling back into view just as the sun was coming up. He leaned his head up close against the window for a better look and fitted a new lens to his camera. He’d at least get some killer pictures, a brief but welcome distraction.
An arc of bright light suddenly split the darkness, silhouetting clouds along the horizon. The garish colors of another sunrise burst forth in rapid succession—purple, red, orange, and radiant yellow—until the spaceplane traveled farther into morning in whatever part of the globe they were over.
Wade was astonished by a new, unexpected sight. With his head against the window, looking straight ahead it appeared as if he were now par
tially outside the spaceplane. His left eye perceived the newly-lit Earth spinning below, outlined against the impenetrable blackness. Yet at the same time, his right clearly saw the inside of the cabin as Marcy floated into view, working near the forward galley.
It appeared as if he were sitting dead center in the sidewall, able to take in the entire scene at once. He gingerly brought his camera up to the glass, afraid of losing the shot and hoping the wide-angle lens would be able to capture that view: Earth on one side, fragile humans going about their business on the other, protected by nothing but a thin metallic cocoon. It forcefully drove home the tenuousness of their existence.
He tried to push that thought from his mind. No use thinking about what else could go wrong now.
We must be near perigee, he thought. Except for a more pronounced curvature along the horizon, the ground appeared not much farther away than it was from a high-altitude jet. He knew it was an illusion just like that view through the window, but it was a powerful one nonetheless. He also knew that each time they passed the low point of their orbit, they dipped farther into the sparse upper atmosphere. More and more stray molecules of air would strike the plane on each pass, adding drag until it was eventually reclaimed. The pilots surely knew that, and the fact that they hadn’t said anything about it told him it was just as certain to be bad news.
It spotlighted their predicament with heartbreaking severity. We aren’t a bunch of faceless, stranded astronauts in some movie script. We’re going to die in sight of our homes, with no way to get there.
…
Alternating between despondency and rage, Ryan steadied himself against the panel and fought the temptation to bang his head against the sidewall. He knew venting his frustration like that would do no one any good, least of all him. And in zero-g the whiplash effect would be even harsher for pulling such a boneheaded stunt. Meanwhile, he saw that Tom remained cool as a cucumber. Damn, but he could be unflappable.
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