Perigee

by Patrick Chiles

  Don’t try to do it all, she told herself. Give them their jobs, and then get some rest until it’s time to perform again.

  It was simultaneously the defining characteristic of a good flight director and the biggest flaw they had to control: the type-A personality necessary for the job had to get out of the way and allow team members to apply their expertise. It had been likened to being a symphony conductor. She almost wished she had a baton to tap on the podium, a gavel to bang…something. She settled for firm silence, peering deliberately over the rim of her glasses.

  “No, we’ll let him sit this one out. I think you guys are quite capable enough. We’ve done rendezvous and prox-ops a few dozen times now.”

  “Except for that whole dead-ship-in-peril part,” another comedian piped up. It was FIDO, the flight dynamics officer. “The ATV’s never had to do a grab-and-go like this,” he said, referring to the automated transfer vehicle. “Are you sure ESA’s up to it?”

  Audrey fought her rising impatience. “If not, I think the guys in the Trench are more than up to the task,” she answered coolly. “You always relish a good math problem, so figure out what we need to do to make this work. Up to and including delta-v changes from Station.”

  The gathered controllers stared at her in disbelief. That last comment had really gotten their attention. Shifting the station’s orbit was no small matter.

  “You’re serious?”

  “This is as serious as it gets,” she said, stepping around to lean against the podium. “Joke about Mr. Kranz all you want, because this is our ‘failure is not an option’ moment. I stuck my neck out pretty far in Abbot’s office for this; I shouldn’t have to argue it with you guys too.”

  After giving that a minute to sink in, she continued. “We are Mission Ops. And we are their only ticket home,” she declared, pointing at their seal hanging on the wall. “It’s our job to find a way around the impossible. ‘Tough and competent’, right?” she asked, quoting the flight controller’s creed.

  Around the room, heads nodded in mute acceptance. This was the first real emergency that most of them had been faced with in years. Certainly, it was the first one they’d been able to actually do anything about in real time.

  “So here’s what I want the rest of you to do. Polaris just gave us a brain-dump on that spaceplane. I want you guys in structures to look at the metallurgy, material properties, torque moments…just make sure that thing doesn’t tear itself off the ATV as they’re pulling it up to the station.”

  She paused to let them process her instructions.

  “I for one am fed up with being able to do nothing but sit back and watch vehicles disintegrate…because it happened too fast to react, because we were blind, it doesn’t matter. I’m sick of just watching while people die. So let’s hop to it.”

  41

  Denver

  Grant sat alone at the conference table in front of a tablet of spaceplane manuals and a cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. He flipped through a notebook filled with the rapidly-figured calculations he and Penny had worked out earlier.

  Behind him other team members manned the flight control stations. Beyond a glass wall, the rest of their team slept on cots. Except for the occasional tapping at a keyboard the room was silent.

  “What am I missing?” he whispered, looking at the digital clocks hung above the big monitor. One counted down relentlessly toward the moment when the orbits would be close enough for that tug to intercept and hopefully drag it up to the space station.

  The transfer vehicle had to get out ahead of Station well in advance to close with Austral Clipper, grab it, and start shifting its orbit. Their orbits weren’t coplanar—on the same track—so they couldn’t just wait until the two got close enough grab the stricken plane. It would need to start much sooner.

  He scoured their notes. The alignment numbers looked dead-on. What about power and water? The ATV had enough impulse to boost them, but the Clipper was easily three times longer than that tug. Their combined center of gravity would be way beyond what they were used to maneuvering with.

  So Gentry and Hunter would have to keep them oriented once they got into close proximity or risk colliding with Station, in which case things would’ve just become a whole lot worse. If they didn’t have their power figured out just right they wouldn’t be able to maintain orientation. It was a blessing that Hunter had at least spent some time in the old shuttle simulator for a decent sense of close maneuvering in orbit. Penny would have to talk them through the rest.

  Complicating the situation were federal safety inspectors who had been peevishly hovering about since this all began. All they needed were a few grim reapers in cheap suits lurking about, he’d complained. Hammond at least had the foresight to run them out until everyone was safely aboard the station.

  Still, there would be a huge investigation to come, and the all-but-assured bad publicity could sink the company. To the rest of the world, this was some real-life science fiction disaster movie unfolding daily. The truth would be far messier.

  He dreaded the inevitable accident review more than the immediate crisis resolution. Having to retrace every event, judgment call and perceived error could get nasty. Justifying one’s decisions was never pleasant. And with the stakes this high, plenty of otherwise disinterested parties were sure to try and latch on. Some crafty lawyer with limited understanding was certain to second-guess something they thought was a glaring oversight, but would just as likely be a result of their own confusion.

  Preoccupied, he took a sip of coffee only to spit the cold, bitter liquid back into his cup. He headed for the door and a fresh pot across the hall, and nearly bowled over a woman in a navy-blue jumpsuit heading his way.

  “Penny!” he said in shock. “We weren’t looking for you to be up here yet.” She had landed an hour ago. “I figured you’d be sacked out after that ride you just had.”

  “I’ll sleep later,” she said wearily. “I’m too wound up right now. Is Houston onboard?”

  “They are,” he said to her evident relief. “They’re prepping that European tug right now. Plan is to undock and start matching periods in ten hours, with about a day to catch up. I just finished briefing the crew on the big picture, but they’re going to need a lot more coaching from you.”

  She closed her eyes and slumped against the wall. “Thank God,” she sighed.

  “You had doubts?”

  “Always,” she said. “You never know how some of those people are going to react, especially Abbot. He’s really got it in for us.”

  “Well, your friend Audrey must have really done a number on him. They’ve put a lot of resources on this.”

  “She shouldn’t have had to,” Penny said with disappointment. “If they really gave a damn they’d have called us to offer help.”

  “Good point,” he admitted. “I’ve been so heads-down that politics never entered my mind.”

  “It’s an acquired skill,” she said acerbically. “Spend enough time in the Agency and you figure that out quick.” She stretched and rubbed bloodshot eyes. “All of a sudden, I’m really tired.”

  “Cots are in the back. I’ll wake you up in a few hours.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” she yawned, and patted his arm as she ambled off towards an open cot. “Somebody’s got to keep you from screwing this up even worse.”

  …

  Will Gardner remained aboard the Block II Clipper, still in his pressure suit. He’d allowed the life-support techs to take his helmet and gloves, but insisted that power be kept on the spaceplane. Changing back to street clothes could wait.

  He wiped his brow with a towel they’d given him. The suit was still connected to an air exchanger, so his body was perfectly cool. But brushes with death, he found, tended to make one overheat.

  Frank and Penny—she especially—had remained uncannily composed. But then again that was the very quality that had brought them all back in one piece. It hadn’t been their first rodeo, he th
ought, but there hadn’t been much time to talk about it.

  For him, on the other hand, it had been quite a roller-coaster ride. Blacking out despite the g-suit had been embarrassing enough. Coming to during the middle of re-entry had been quite another sensation entirely. Already disoriented, he awoke to a swirl of confusion in a cockpit filled with an unearthly glow.

  “Am I dead?” he’d asked groggily.

  “If you are, then we’re all screwed,” Penny had said. “Because that doesn’t look like any vision of Heaven I’ve ever imagined.” Their windshield was filled with a hypersonic stream of fiery plasma.

  “Good point,” he’d mumbled, and heard Frank laugh through his helmet radio.

  While the two pilots might have been used to that kind of emergency, Will was not. Flight testing had its moments, as each new model had to be wrung out through some often wild maneuvers. One could never be entirely certain how a plane would respond, which was the whole point. He’d never been truly out of control before, much less headed for orbit that way.

  And he was mad.

  There hadn’t been any time to dig into it up there, but his gut told him something was really screwy inside the control software. He’d fortunately held on to the update discs he’d brought for the flight computers, and had just run another validation check. It was a painfully long process as the test program had to compare every single byte of navigation data before he could dig into the actual control logic.

  But now he could go through it, line by line, and he’d had a pretty good hunch where to start. The new code scrolled past on one screen, with the old on an adjacent screen.

  There it was…RCS control. Primary routines matched up, at least superficially, so he dug deeper. Lines of code went by in a blur as he searched for anything out of the ordinary. He was hoping for something obvious, otherwise he’d have to go back and compare it character by character.

  It didn’t take long. A new subroutine stood out like a sore thumb. It was there for a specific task that didn’t exist in the original software load, but written like any one of the thousands of other subroutines. So it would have passed the usual validation and function checks.

  A lot of things could’ve gotten past the usual checks, he realized. They’d been in a hurry, which is not something that normally happened in flight test. But this had not really been a test flight, had it? Penny had made the risks extremely clear when she’d approached him about it yesterday.

  There had been plenty enough pressure to pull this off in the first place. Why had they allowed something new to be introduced at the last minute?

  Because FMS updates happen all the time, he realized. Flying with the most current version was standard procedure. You just did it, without a second thought. Looking back, that had been really stupid in this case and would’ve certainly been discussed in a post-flight debrief.

  And as he stared at the new lines of code, it seemed even dumber. They looked like everything else in there, though to a layman they might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics. But for someone who knew what to look for, it was all terrifyingly obvious. They were specific and not difficult to find at all, once he’d located their root command. There…a new sequence, designed to activate when a specific set of conditions had been reached…

  Logic bomb. That’s what the code monkeys called it. One of the earliest tricks of the hacker trade.

  He sat up and peered closer in disbelief…someone did know what they were looking for when they wrote this code. Of course they did, or it would’ve been spit back out by the validation software. He’d expected to find an error, some squirrely loop that made the RCS go stupid.

  But this was no error. And it certainly wasn’t very well hidden.

  Will felt his heart racing. Suddenly nauseated, he wiped at fresh pinpricks of sweat that trickled down his brow. Whoever wrote this had been in a hurry and wasn’t concerned about anyone ever finding it…because it only needed to work once. They hadn’t planned on anyone returning with the evidence.

  42

  Denver

  Hammond yawned as he put down the phone, having just finished calling the families of everyone aboard flight 501. It was a mercifully short list.

  The phone wouldn’t seem to stop ringing tonight, which he supposed should have been expected. Tomorrow, he and Taggart would face the press as a united front…hopefully. For all of his grooming, Leo could still be cantankerous—a well-spoken loose cannon. Any reporter without an ear for understatement would get rolled fast. That ability was a big reason he’d kept the guy around after buying up the old Polaris Airlines. The man’s business acumen and long relationships with some lucrative customers were others.

  Leo had just told him of another call from one of the cable networks, all but demanding access. Closer to home, a too-clever local reporter had managed to get hold of a Polaris ramp crew uniform and fake ID, and had been confronted at one of the parking gates as he snooped around. The clown was now cooling his heels in a TSA holding cell. But it had also drawn more undesired attention from federal inspectors who were already stalking them like rabid hyenas.

  Hammond had felt a brief flash of rage, but composed himself. Fatigue was getting to him. It could have been worse.

  A lot of things could have been worse this week, he realized. Much worse. If Tom hadn’t held the pitch angle he did, chances were pretty good they’d have burned up in a too-steep re-entry. He’d given them a fighting chance.

  So what happened to my spaceplane? Hammond asked himself. The family calls were made, Grant and Stratton were managing the rescue, and nothing else of much consequence would happen for a few hours…hopefully.

  He didn’t even want to think about their stock, which had been predictably tanking ever since the market opened yesterday.

  He was finally left with time to think about what could have gone wrong up there. He certainly understood the design well enough. And engines don’t just refuse to shut down. Something clearly interfered with the power controls; there were too many different solenoids that could’ve interrupted gas flow.

  So why didn’t they at least shut off the oxidizer flow? The mains would’ve choked for sure: no air, no combustion. Struggling to remember the exact system layout, he walked over to the big bookcase and lifted out a large binder of schematics.

  Where would that O2 have gone, he wondered. Would it have stayed in the tanks, or would it have just vented overboard? Tom must have realized how this might end up, and had made sure they’d isolated the cabin tanks from the engine supply so it at least didn’t burn up their breathable air. One more way he had bought them some time.

  Tracing a finger along the schematics, he followed the system path. No, they could’ve been shut off if he’d been able to isolate the cabin tanks. So why didn’t they? He picked the phone back up and hit Grant’s speed-dial button. “Question…did Gentry say they tried shutting off the O2 flow to the mains?”

  “I believe so. Got to think he tried—that’d be a stupid thing to miss. We’ll need to have another look at the telemetry to make sure.”

  “Please do, and get back to me.” He hung up and leaned back into the sofa. This still wasn’t making any sense, he thought, and stared up at the ceiling. No way Tom would’ve missed such an obvious solution…so where did that leave them? It left them with simultaneous failures of independent, redundant systems, and haywire thrusters on the model that had nearly scattered Penny and her crew halfway across Canada. What were the odds of all that happening at once?

  Pretty damned small, he decided. He picked up the phone again and thumbed another speed dial.

  “Security command post,” a low, even-tempered voice answered.

  “This is Hammond. I need your watch supervisor up here in my office, ASAP. Have him grab the quality control manager on his way up.”

  …

  “Sure you don’t want a smoke?” Donner offered, flopping into a chair by the quality inspector’s desk. “Nobody here to bark about it,” he
said with a conspiratorial look around the empty room. Of the eight cubicles on the open floor only one was occupied on the overnight shift.

  “Come on Walt, you know I can’t,” the man protested. “Nobody can smoke in here, even before HR started their health crusade. Something stupid happens, and all these records go up in flames? Not on my watch, pal,” he declared, waving toward a wall of wide filing cabinets. Each was stuffed with repair and inspection reports for every plane in the fleet, going back to the day each one came from the factory.

  “Suit yourself,” Donner said as he casually tossed the pack of cigs on the desk between them. He leaned back in the chair and stretched, looking toward the clock. “Going on midnight. Man, you never get used to the graveyard shift, let me tell you.”

  “It helps if you’re already a night owl,” the inspector replied. “I’m usually up until two or three anyway.”

  He looked it, Donner thought. Single guy, probably not even thirty yet—still liked the nightlife a little too much for his own good.

  “Yeah, it’s us married guys that get screwed. You don’t want to have to do this with kids.”

  The younger man snorted. “Trust me, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Not in my plans, Walt.”

  “That’s what they all say. Surprises happen.”

  “Not to me. Not yet.”

  Like I said, Donner thought. The quality inspector must have been thinking the same thing. He stared off in contemplation of something, then back to the pack of cigarettes tossed on his desk. “Mind if I bum a smoke?” he finally asked.

  “Thought you couldn’t do that in here,” Donner mocked.

  “I’m going outside, smartass. Can you keep an eye on things here for a minute?” he asked. “That’s the one downside of night shift. Somebody’s got to be here all the time, so it’s pretty hard to get out for breaks.”