FREEFALL
EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT
VOLUME 1
FELIX R. SAVAGE
Copyright © 2016 by Felix R. Savage
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FREEFALL
CHAPTER 1
The final space shuttle flight in history lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a sunny afternoon in 2011. “Atlantis, Houston, you are go at throttle up.” Atlantis was flying like an angel. “Feel that mother go,” Jack said jubilantly. “I mean, roger, we are go at throttle up.” The gee-forces were insane! The vibration rattled the teeth in his head. Waiting for the SRBs to burn out and detach, he grinned. Nothing could prepare you for this. But he was prepared. He’d been preparing all his life.
The roaring stopped on cue. The vibration lessened as Atlantis climbed out of the atmosphere. Gravity released its hold on the astronauts, and Jack engaged the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) thrusters with a noise like an artillery barrage. Time to go to work.
Atlantis hadn’t been wheeled out one last time so that four astronauts could enjoy the view.
Oh, no.
STS-136—a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the ‘big five’ US intelligence agencies—had a specific, secret goal. The Atlantis was a delivery truck, and their package was going to Keyhole-12a, aka Frostbite, a digital imaging satellite whose very existence was kept a secret from the public.
A year ago, Frostbite’s main mirror had cracked catastrophically. A huge flake of glass had spalled off, degrading its capacity to take high-resolution pictures of Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and other foreign military installations.
The DoD contractors couldn’t craft a replacement mirror in under a year, so they’d missed the cut-off for STS-135.
And so NASA’s partners, the United Space Alliance, had processed Atlantis for her absolutely definitely last flight.
When Jack heard he’d been selected as pilot, his shout of elation had brought people out of nearby offices in JSC’s Building 4 South, asking if he’d won the lottery. “Yes,” Jack had said. “I did!”
Now here he was, driving the world’s fastest delivery truck.
Thundering around Earth at orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, the Atlantis first had to be inspected for any damage the heat shields might’ve sustained during launch. Everything checked out. “This bird could keep flying for decades if they’d let her,” said Mission Specialist Linda Moskowitz. Mission Commander Greg Howard shook his head at that. No political talk. Not when everything was being recorded. Jack kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t even American. British, dual nationality. He knew better than to say what he thought of Congress.
Anyway, they had this: Earth in the windows, streaky blue and white, the most stunning sight an astronaut would ever see. Jack admired the view in the sliver of time before the start of their sleep period. It fascinated him. He found Europe, shy of the terminator. A blanket of cloud hid Britain—of course—but he imagined he could see Nuneaton, where he’d grown up, and the Mach Loop in Wales, where he’d learned low level flying as a Tornado pilot. He imagined his parents standing in the garden, looking at the sky, knowing he was up there somewhere.
Something weird happened then. His headset made a pipping noise. The faint tones reminded him of the BBC radio pips—beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beeeep—and then they blended into a whine that flowed up and down the scale. Jack was in the pilot’s seat, just keeping an eye on things; he leant forward and checked his comms panel. Receiving on the S band. Automatic antenna selection enabled. Wheeeooooeeee.
He turned the antenna selection dial, cycling through all eight positions, forward and aft.
The tone went away when he limited reception to the aft antenna positions.
Came back when he selected the forward positions.
UL FWD—upper left forward—strongest of all.
Line of sight away from Earth.
Receiving from the outer solar system.
Jack drew breath to call to the others, get up here, you have to hear this, and then he grew abashed. His cheeks heated.
It’s just cosmic noise.
Or some clever-clogs hacker pranking the space shuttle.
Yet he kept listening, hunched tensely in his seat.
Wheeeooooeeewww …
The whine grew fainter, and then suddenly scaled up into a tone that stabbed his ears, loud, startling, and repugnant—nails on a blackboard, the electronic version, at 150 decibels.
Jack ripped his headset off with a startled cry. The sound shrieked from the earphones for another second, and then stopped.
“Everything OK up there?” Howard called up through the hatch.
“Fine,” Jack called, deciding to pretend it away. Pure instinct.
His headset swayed in the air on the end of its cord. Ears ringing, he eyed it like a poisonous snake.
Eventually he held it to one ear.
Nothing. Not a whine, beep, or pip.
He sat dissatisfiedly fiddling with the antennas for a few minutes, checking the other comms systems. Nothing.
It was just a glitch.
Seen too many science fiction films, Kildare.
Yeah.
No astronaut should watch Contact five times. Let alone Alien. (Jack’s favorite film in that franchise was actually Alien vs. Predator.)
Resolving to forget all about it, he tethered his sleeping-bag to the wall and closed his eyes.
I mean, who knows what’s out there? Who knows, eh? No one knows. And we’ll never find out, at this rate …
They woke to The Drifters crooning Up On the Roof, piped up from Mission Control.
“STS-135 got a special message and a song from Paul McCartney,” Mission Commander Howard said. “What are we, afterthoughts?”
“Is that your official statement, Greg?” said Mission Control.
“Aw, stick it up your ass. We are honored and proud to be the last astronauts who’ll ever have to endure Mission Control’s taste in music. And now, we’re switching to encrypted comms as we wipe the sleep out of our eyes and start prepping for EVA.”
Dipping lower towards Earth, Atlantis was overhauling Frostbite in its lower reconnaissance orbit. They caught up with it on Day Three. By that time they’d run successful tests of the Canadarm, using the OBSS camera system to check the heat shields, and the two mission specialists were enduring their ‘camp-out’ in the airlock in preparation for their EVA. Jack maneuvered the shuttle neatly into synchronization with the bus-sized, gossamer-winged satellite.
“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, urgin
g 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 gone, 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 Chinese 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 disas
ter. 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 Ivankov.
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.”
Freefall: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 1) Page 1
