“You could drive for UPS,” Howard congratulated him.
“The second career I’ve always aspired to.”
Howard smiled. He was fifty-nine. His second career would be a victory lap through the executive boardrooms of the private aerospace industry. He would speak at elementary schools, urging children to take an interest in space, when their government was sending the opposite message.
Jack had no second career planned. He’d stay with NASA until they carried him out feet first. Even if he never got to fly again, there’d be interesting work to do in flight dynamics. The thought made him die a bit inside. He decorated it with the images of a wife and kids, the family life that no astronaut had time for … Still not feeling it.
Funnily enough, his imaginary wife had the elfin face of Mission Specialist Moskowitz. Linda was known as NASA’s secret public relations weapon. There hadn’t been a female astronaut as hot as her since Anna Lee Fisher. Not that she knew it, or anything.
Jack leaned forward, spoke into the radio. “Looking good out there, Linda.” Howard smirked sideways at him. All they could see of Moskowitz from the flight deck was the rectangular top of her life support backpack.
“So how’re you liking that digital camera, Jack?” Howard said, gesturing to the Canon Jack wore on a band around his wrist.
They didn’t know each other that well, but Howard knew Jack was a keen amateur photographer. It was pretty much all he did outside work.
“It’s flipping great!” Jack said. “Trust me, in five years, no one will be using cameras that take film. This is the future. 15 megapixels of digital beauty.”
Howard scoffed amiably.
“I’m removing the mirror tray now,” Moskowitz said.
Jack was controlling the Canadarm, the space shuttle’s robotic arm. It looked like a fifty-meter white crab claw. Moskowitz balanced on the tip of the arm, facing the aft avionics bay of the satellite.
“Go for it, Linda,” Howard said.
She fell gently backwards, holding the 1.2-tonne mirror.
“Whoops,” she said. “Dropped it.”
Mission Specialist Rivera, waiting in the shuttle’s payload bay, let loose a stream of curses.
“Just kidding,” Moskowitz said sweetly. “Jack, can you take me back to the bay now?”
Jack maneuvered the Canadarm, rolling the joystick gently between the balls of his fingers. “Sure you can manage that, Linda? It’s not too heavy for you?”
Just kidding! The mirror had mass, and could get away from them if they weren’t careful. But it weighed precisely nothing up here. Like each of them did. This was Jack’s second shuttle flight, although it was his first time as pilot. He loved freefall—the sensation of having grown longer, the freedom to decide that ‘up’ was the way his head was pointing. He’d never gotten spacesick. Headache, yeah, but you pissed that out by Day Two.
Rivera did get spacesick. He was on his fourth mission, so obviously he could handle it. But Jack could tell how crap he must be feeling from his grumpy tone. “Careful, Linda … Just put it over there in the return bay.”
Jack and Howard, in the two-man station at the back of the shuttle, could not see either of the mission specialists now. They were out of sight in the payload bay. In a moment, Rivera would request Jack to maneuver him out on the Canadarm, with the billion-dollar replacement mirror.
Then it happened.
A clangorous boom reverberated through the space shuttle, as if someone had hit it with a giant hammer.
Moskowitz: “Holy shit what was—”
Rivera: “It hit us! Jesus H. Christ guys, I saw it! It collided with the fucking fuselage!”
Howard sprang forward in his foot tethers. “Jack, get that spin under control or we’re going to torque out the arm!” He keyed up the comms. “Houston, Atlantis, be aware we’ve just suffered a suspected debris impact.””
Jack nulled the slow rotation the impact had imparted.
Rivera: “I’m going out—”
Howard: “No, Jesse, you are not going out. Have we got any visuals? Jack, gimme what we’ve got.”
“Here it is,” Jack said. He played back the view from the camera on the Canadarm.
In a series of still frames, a bright point of debris shot out of the blackness. It tore through the Atlantis’s port OMS housing and exited stage left through the side of the cargo bay.
The Atlantis continued to fall serenely around Earth. But liquid hydrazine spurted out in a straight line before forming globules, like water from a high-pressure hose, from a hole in the port OMS thruster’s spherical fuel tank.
Jack fought the shuttle’s sudden loss of attitude control, struggling to counter the additional thrust caused by the venting fuel.
“At your discretion, Greg, slap a patch on that hole,” said Mission Control. “We’re looking at options for you. Now, run the flight check-lists for OMS fuel venting.”
Jack could imagine the pandemonium down there right now. Fifty mission controllers had just been plunged into a scenario no one could prepare for, even though it could be, and had been, anticipated. It was like Armageddon. They were playing the odds. And this time they’d gotten unlucky.
He collected the repair kit and flew through the shuttle to the airlock, faster than he’d ever moved in his life.
CHAPTER 2
Jack wrenched open the inner hatch of the airlock. He placed the tools, insulation, and glue in the airlock for Rivera and Moskowitz to pick up.
Then he looked around for a piece of paper. Nothing. OK. In his pocket—a letter from his mother. He tore little pieces off the fragile sheet of airmail paper. Moving around the inside of the crew module, he let the scraps go one by one, and held his breath to see which way they’d fall. If the scraps were pulled towards the wall, it would indicate a hairline crack in the pressure vessel. That could kill them all faster than any fuel leak.
No damage.
Their unexpected visitor had confined its destruction to the OMS pod, the side of the shuttle, and the starboard wing.
Rivera, spacewalking aft, struggled to patch the hole in the OMS pod. Jack watched him from the window into the payload bay, and took photographs for Mission Control’s viewing pleasure. The struts connecting the fuel tank to the fuselage were crumpled like bendy drinking straws. The thermal blankets had caved in like the bonnet of a car that had been in an accident. There wasn’t even any point patching it, but they did anyway, before starting on the rest of the damage.
While that was going on, Moskowitz completed the installation of Frostbite’s replacement mirror.
NASA gets the job done.
It wasn’t like there was anything else she could be doing right now, anyway.
Back inside, Mission Control confirmed what they already knew: OMS B was a dead loss. Worse still, the impact had mauled the sensors and wiring in the side of the payload bay and wing.
Jack floated, upside-down to the layout of the upper deck, one finger on the hole leading to the mid-deck. He was wrung-out and stinking like a pig. He’d been working flat out for five hours. Howard looked like he hadn’t left the commander’s station all that time. You can’t slump in zero-gee, but the mission commander’s face sagged, his age showing. “Listen,” Howard said to Mission Control, “we saw the debris. You’ve seen the pictures. There’s no question in anyone’s mind, or there shouldn’t be: it was a piece of the Great Chinese Science Experiment.”
That made sense to Jack. The lump of debris that disabled the Atlantis had most likely come from the Great Chinese Science Experiment—as it was known in the Astronaut Corps—of 2007. In that year, the Chinese had blown up one of their own old weather satellites with a kinetic kill vehicle, strewing 750 kilograms of debris throughout low earth orbit. They pretty much admitted they’d done it just because they could. The potential consequences for future spacecraft were foreseeable, and had been disregarded. Now, the inevitable had happened.
“Either that,” Howard said, “or the Chines
e just conducted another satellite kill test. Missed Frostbite, hit us.”
Jack grimaced to himself. Even given the aggressive stance that the Chinese military had recently been taking, that seemed unlikely. “Maybe aliens did it,” he murmured, remembering the odd electronic screech he had heard over the radio before the disaster. Wheeeooooeeee … EEEEEE!
Nah. It was the Great Chinese Science Experiment, no question about it.
“It could have been debris from Iridium-Cosmos,” Mission Control said, referring to the 2009 collision between a Russian communications satellite and an Iridium GPS sat.
“You know it wasn’t,” Howard grunted.
“Greg, we’re not going to go public with any kind of speculations until we do some analysis of the damage.”
“Fine,” Howard said. “Let’s get back to that. The insulation is too seriously damaged for us to fix.”
What he meant was: the Atlantis now had no re-entry system. Without extensive repairs, she was never going to return to Earth.
“If we’re going with the ISS lifeboat option, I want to change orbit to catch up with it.”
Jack pulled himself ‘down’ so his head poked into the mid-deck. He flashed a thumbs-up to Moskowitz and Rivera.
“Jack, get up here,” Howard said. “Need you to do an orbit change. We’re going to be cutting our margins thin on this, and you’ve got to do the burns with only one OMS online.”
On the mid-deck, Moskowitz and Rivera, in their underwear, holding hands, spun around in a clumsy zero-gee victory dance.
Jack bounced back up into the cockpit, buoyant with relief. The Atlantis had suffered a fatal blow, but unlike in decades past, that wasn’t an automatic death sentence for the crew. The International Space Station—humanity’s home away from home in low Earth orbit—was ready and waiting to take them in.
CHAPTER 3
Almost two days later, four weary astronauts rose out of the Atlantis’s crew hatch. Jack was the third to exit. Someone seized his wrist and hauled him into the airlock of the ISS’s Harmony module. “Now the ISS has problems,” growled cosmonaut Alexei Ivanov.
Jack grabbed Alexei’s shaved head in both hands and pretended to twist it off. “The only problem with the ISS is it’s infested with bloody Russians.”
The two knew each other well. They’d overlapped in Star City, the Russian counterpart of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, when Jack was undergoing his Soyuz training. On icy nights—not that there was any other kind of night in Russia, as far as Jack could tell—they used to drive out into the forest and blast away at tree-trunks with Alexei’s service weapon. Other times, they’d venture into Moscow and try to pick up astronaut groupies. There were astronaut groupies in Russia. Not in the US.
Mission Commander Howard floated out of the shuttle’s crew hatch. He looked tired and older than ever. Their ordeal nursing the nearly-fatally wounded Atlantis to the ISS had taken a lot out of him. Jack saw a glint of wetness on Howard’s eyelashes, and looked away in a hurry as the mission commander futilely blinked. Tears didn’t flow in microgravity, but that didn’t stop them coming. Howard had been saying goodbye to the Atlantis.
America’s longest-running spaceflight program hadn’t been meant to end like this. They should’ve touched down at Kennedy Space Center to quiet congratulations, the satisfaction of a job well done, the bittersweet pride of having been the last astronauts to fly on a space shuttle.
Instead, they’d be flying home by Soyuz, one by one, over the span of the next year.
Alexei explained the tentative schedule for their return. It was going to take that long because custom seats had to be made for each of them, molded to their bodies, as well as specially designed Russian re-entry suits.
The nature of the Atlantis’s original mission was a delicate subject, and neither Alexei nor Jack alluded to it. But Jack knew Roscosmos had to be pissed as hell at having to bail out an NRO mission, and would charge a hefty price for the rescue. At least NASA had taken seat molds for the crew themselves. Some difficulties you could anticipate.
Rivera would go first, on account of his spacesickness, although no one mentioned this. Then Howard. Moskowitz third. Jack last.
“I was due a holiday,” Jack said, eyeing the science experiments lining the walls of the US lab module.
“We will keep you busy,” Alexei threatened. “You can start by looking after my lettuces. They don’t grow properly.”
“I don’t have a green thumb. More like a brown one,” Jack said uneasily.
“There are toilets to clean, too,” Alexei offered, grinning.
The two mission specialists from the Atlantis had gone ahead into the Tranquility module, eager to visit the famous Cupola. Jack was saving that for later. No matter how much busywork they gave him, he’d surely have plenty of time to revel in the views. He showed his Canon to Alexei, who asked if he had any dirty pictures on the memory card.
The two men floated through the Russian storage module, and down a tunnel lined with white plastic pillows, barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. It felt like taking a trip down a robot’s esophagus. At the far end of the tunnel, Alexei braked with one hand. He put a finger to his lips. Jack, coming up alongside him, heard voices in the Russian module ahead, the heart of the ISS, known as Central Port.
Howard had gone past them while they were shooting the breeze in the US lab module. One of the voices was his. The other had to be Katharine Menelaou, the current station chief.
“—needless,” Howard was saying. “It could be parked in a graveyard orbit, where its orbit wouldn’t decay due to atmospheric drag. Power it down, fix it up, bring it home later.”
He was talking about the Atlantis.
“It could be, Greg,” said Menelaou. The station chief had a folksy Midwestern lilt to her voice. But you could hear the hard edges under the Ohio niceness. “I’m just telling you since you asked, it probably won’t be. They are leaning towards deorbiting the shuttle in a reasonably short timeframe.”
“Well, I guess we might be able to scoop some of her out of the Pacific, after she burns up in the atmosphere.”
Howard didn’t sound happy about that. But personally, Jack thought a fiery deorbit would be a more honorable fate for the old space shuttle than NASA’s original plan to decommission her and display her alongside her sisters. The Atlantis deserved better than to be flayed and wired up in a museum for an indifferent public to glance at.
“It’s a shame,” Howard said. “That’s all. It’s a damn shame.”
“I know,” Menelaou said. “But it’ll be decided way higher up the food chain.”
Alexei raised his eyebrows at Jack. He whispered: “Ball-breaker.” Jack suppressed a laugh.
They pushed off and floated out of the tunnel, into Central Port. There was no ‘up’ and ‘down’ on the ISS, but the little portholes set into one wall, framing views of Earth, made that wall feel like the floor, and that’s the way Menelaou and Howard were oriented.
“Hi, Kate,” Alexei said. “I’m just showing Jack around. It’s his first time on-station.”
“Yeah?” Katharine Menelaou looked Jack up and down. “Jack Kildare, OK. The Brit. First mission?”
“No,” Jack said. No, ma’am was on the tip of his tongue. Something about the rail-thin, hard-faced Menelaou triggered old military habits he’d largely shaken off. He rudely scratched one armpit to undo any impression of subservience. “My first mission was STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission, in 2009.”
“Ah. Well, welcome aboard,” Menelaou said. “It’s gonna be a bit crowded, obviously …”
The ISS had already been fully staffed, with a total of six people on-station: three Russian cosmonauts, two Americans, and a Japanese robotics researcher. The crew of the Atlantis brought their numbers to ten—the most in ISS history. However, with so many modules separated by tunnels and 90-degree angles, it didn’t feel crowded. In fact, compared to the crew module of the space shuttle, this was a McM
ansion. Jack smiled blandly at the station chief.
“We’ve got plenty of food, so don’t worry about that,” Menelaou went on. “As far as sleeping areas go, you can take your pick of walls.”
“He can sleep in Zvezda, with us,” Alexei said.
After a moment, Menelaou said, “OK, yeah, that’ll work.” Jack smiled in thanks, while privately wishing Alexei hadn’t made the offer. He did appreciate it, as he knew he wouldn’t be getting one of the deluxe sleeping booths in the US lab module, anyway. But it underlined his separateness from the American contingent, something he was never eager to draw attention to.
“Jack,” Howard said, “we’re going to organize a series of EVAs to inspect the damage to the Atlantis. While that’s being prepped, I want you to take as many high resolution photographs as you can to cover the impact points, and make sure you have enough angles for 3D reconstruction. The post mortem on this is going to be huge. There might even be a Congressional investigation, depending on what the cause of the impact ultimately turns out to be.”
You mean, if they can prove it came from the Great Chinese Science Experiment, Jack thought. Which will be a lot harder if the Atlantis is de-orbited and burnt up on re-entry. He suddenly realized that Howard might have other motivations besides sentimentality for opposing that plan. On the other hand, he could understand that the bureaucrats at the top of the NASA food chain might not want China openly blamed for the catastrophe.
“I’ll have to testify in committee, anyway,” Howard said gloomily. “Related to that, we’ll need to pull all the logs and transcripts, and everyone will need to prepare a statement and personal report.”
“You got it,” Jack said.
Alexei hadn’t been kidding. They were going to be kept busy.
Yet even with a full daily schedule of duties, including two hours a day of exercise, the astronauts on the ISS had free time from about eight o’clock until lights-out at midnight. Some wrestled with the appallingly slow broadband connection to exchange emails with their families. Some squeezed in more exercise. Alexei was carrying on a long-distance relationship with a Russian female military pilot stationed in Syria. He agonized over love-emails to her, while fending off uproariously bad advice from the other cosmonauts—well, Jack gathered it was uproarious, the way they all laughed.
The Signal And The Boys: A Prequel to the Earth's Last Gambit Series of First Contact Technothrillers Page 5
