Zero Limit

by Jeremy K. Brown

  “Can we warn anyone?” the president said. “Cities? Towns? First responders?”

  “We’re talking minutes, sir,” said Lee. “Call whoever you can in that time.”

  The president shot Secretary of State Katz a look.

  “On it,” she said, and ran from the room.

  “Dr. Lee,” said the president. “Do whatever you have to do.”

  Lee nodded and turned to Kittredge.

  “Mr. Secretary,” he asked, “do I have your permission to hack into the missile’s guidance system and reset the clock?”

  Kittredge looked surprised that Lee would even bother to ask.

  “Well, hell yes you do!” he sputtered. “What are you even asking me for?”

  “Just trying to go by the book,” said Lee, opening his holopad and starting to punch the keys. “I don’t want to die in ADX Florence because I neglected to follow protocol.”

  His fingers moving like a virtuoso musician, Lee quickly hacked into the missile’s guidance system. Kittredge watched him, a somewhat disconcerted look on his face.

  “You can do this from a holopad?”

  Lee gave him a sideways glance. “If more people knew what they could do from a holopad, this world would be far less safe,” he said. “OK, I’m in! All right, looks like the mission clock is at four minutes . . . so let’s just move things up a bit . . .”

  With a few deft keystrokes, Lee reset the missile’s clock, deceiving the onboard guidance systems into believing they were farther into the launch than they actually were. On the other side of the world, where it had already traveled in preparation for its rendezvous with the Thresher, the Thunderclap responded to its new instructions perfectly. The second stage began to fire while coupled to the still-burning first stage. The reaction was almost instantaneous, with heat and liquid fuel erupting out from the sides of the two attached stages. The fire raced up the side of the missile. When it could no longer withstand the sundering forces, the Thunderclap missile exploded in a spectacular fireball. Unfortunately, the warhead, heated by the extreme temperatures from the burning ascent stages, also ignited and detonated in an airburst approximately eighty miles above Papua New Guinea. Residents there, as well as throughout Indonesia and parts of Australia, were immediately plunged into blackness as the EMP generated by the explosion wreaked havoc with every electrical system, from cell phones to onboard computer systems in their cars. In exchange for the inconvenience, they were rewarded with an incredible light display as the weapon’s charged particles mingled with the planet’s magnetic field, creating auroras for hundreds of miles.

  Back at the PDCO, Sara sat in her office with her hands folded, waiting to hear news from either Caitlin or the White House. She thought about everything that had happened since she first received that distress call from Caitlin Taggart. In some ways, she wondered if she was the same person. She had spent so much of the last decade just looking forward, not daring a glance back over her shoulder. After college, Sara had vowed that she would never let anyone come between her and her goals again. And over the years, she had held fast to that vow. It had served her well. But since the stranded crew on the asteroid had first called to her, things had changed. Suddenly she understood what Caitlin had said about how she’d felt when her daughter was born. There wasn’t time to think about yourself or your own problems, because someone was depending on you to act. In some ways, Caitlin Taggart had given Sara her life back. She supposed she loved her for that, and she hoped she’d get the chance to thank her in person.

  As Sara contemplated these things, Alex came into her office with a relieved expression on his face.

  “What’ve you got?” Sara asked.

  “They were able to detonate the missile in the upper atmosphere,” he said. “Not an ideal solution, and the EMP screwed up a lot of lives in the southern hemisphere, but the trajectory of the Thresher wasn’t affected. It’s still going to miss us.”

  He looked at Sara’s face as he relayed this news and suddenly looked annoyed.

  “You know,” he said, “if this is how you react to good news, I’m just going to start coming in with bad news and see how that plays out.”

  “The EMP,” Sara said. “Anything within the blast radius not armed with countermeasures will be completely disabled, right?”

  “That’s how I’ve been led to believe they work, yes.”

  “Caitlin and Vee are still in the Alley Oop.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  As the world was trying to avoid engineering its own destruction, Caitlin and Vee continued their steady course back to Earth aboard the Alley Oop. While the threat of being arrested for illegally entering Terran space was no longer an option, they still had no guarantee that their ship could survive reentry. So far, Shaw’s grim prediction that, without the protection of the Mylar insulation, the Tamarisk would be seared by the Sun’s light had not come to pass. However, there was still the heat shield to contend with. With that in mind and with them growing closer and closer to Earth, Caitlin was trying to hail someone from ICC to see if they could be towed in.

  No response.

  “This is escape lander Alley Oop calling ICC control, can anyone hear me?”

  “It doesn’t sound like anyone’s listening,” said Vee.

  “I’m thinking everyone’s hunkered down because of that big damn missile that the president launched,” Caitlin said. “Or it could be something on our end. Maybe the onboard communication system has finally given out. I doubt this ship was designed to take this kind of pounding. Or last for as long as it has.”

  “You could be right,” Vee mused. “Or it could just be that legal or illegal, no one is interested in coming out for a capsule carrying a pair of immigrants.”

  “Sad but true,” Caitlin agreed. “Whatever the case is, it doesn’t paint a very rosy picture for our return home. We’re gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way. Let’s start the reentry cycle and see if we can—”

  Before Caitlin could finish her sentence, everything on board the Alley Oop blinked out at once, leaving them in darkness save for the sunlight reflected into the viewports as well as the light from Earth. Shocked and confused by what had just happened, they both made their way to the windows, Vee with considerable effort, and looked out to see if they could divine what had happened. Looking down, they could make out ribbons of green and blue unfurling in serpentine lines across the planet’s atmosphere.

  “What is that?” Vee wondered. “The aurora borealis?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’re over the South Pacific. I think we’re looking at the aftereffects of the president’s new toy.”

  “The nuke?” said Vee. “So that was an EMP that just hit us.”

  “Looks that way,” said Caitlin. “Which means we’re dead in the water and no one knows we’re out here. And with all our systems dead, life support is going to give out. On top of that, thanks to the ionization in the atmosphere, all our communications are now officially dead and gone.”

  “That’s all very bad,” agreed Vee. “But here’s something worse. We’re coming up on the atmosphere, but we’re still upside down relative to Earth, right?”

  “Right,” said Caitlin, slowly getting the picture.

  “Without thrusters to turn us over or the guidance computer to tell the ship when to do it, we’re going to enter the atmosphere on the opposite side of the ship’s heat shield.”

  “Which means that we’re going to burn up in about thirty minutes,” said Caitlin.

  “Uh-huh. If that.”

  “OK,” said Caitlin, starting to assess options.

  “We could always bail out,” said Vee.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Half kidding,” Vee said. “Yuri Gagarin did it. He never actually landed the Vostok 1 spacecraft back in 1961. He ejected from the ship at twenty-three thousand feet and parachuted to Earth.”

  “Well, if it’s all the same to you,” said Caitlin, “I’d rath
er explore alternatives.”

  Vee rubbed her temples as though trying to draw an idea to the surface. Then an idea dramatically hit Caitlin.

  “You’re gonna hate me for this,” she told Vee, “but I’m gonna need you to get into your EMU suit and come outside with me.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Vee, giving her a tentative look.

  “Whatever we can.”

  Around the world, the mood was one of triumph and euphoria at having avoided annihilation. In nearly every city, all work had ceased and the streets were teeming with revelers celebrating the Thresher’s near miss.

  In the areas affected by the nuclear blast’s electromagnetic pulse, relief was swift and came from a variety of sources. The president sent in everyone from the Red Cross to FEMA to the Peace Corps, and other nations joined the call as well, extending a hand in whatever way they could. There was still a lot of political maneuvering to be done, given the fact that the US president had detonated a nuclear weapon over Oceanian airspace. The circumstances surrounding the launch and the diversion of the asteroid meant that government officials weren’t prepared to go to war over the incident, but they did expect the president to roll up his sleeves and clean up the mess he’d had a hand in making, something he was more than willing to do. For him, it was a matter of atonement.

  The only thing left for him to do was address the nation. However, he had insisted on waiting until he knew the fates of the two women who had escaped the asteroid.

  “I want to know if I need to welcome them home as heroes or honor them as martyrs,” he told his staff.

  Unfortunately, no answer was yet forthcoming and the news from the PDCO was grim. No one had heard from the Alley Oop in more than six hours.

  In the time it took for Vee and Caitlin to get into their EMU suits, the Alley Oop had come down even farther. The two women had a flicker of hope when the ship’s instrumentation came back on, but those hopes were dashed when they saw that the reentry protocols had been wiped from the hard drive as a result of the EMP.

  “Jesus,” Vee said when she took stock of this new development. “How much did Ross spend on this bucket anyway?”

  “Less than he did on his wardrobe, I can promise you that,” said Caitlin.

  With no reentry protocol and the guidance system also failing, they had no choice but to go with Caitlin’s plan. She and Vee would have to make their way to the outside of the Alley Oop and tether themselves to the ship’s hull. After that, Caitlin said they could attempt to use the thrusters in their suits’ onboard RCS to try to generate enough force to turn the ship over. Whether the two women could do that before they entered the atmosphere or even do it at all was a legitimate concern.

  With both of them ready, Caitlin depressurized the ship and opened the hatch. Moving gently so as not to jostle her knee, Vee drifted out into space and anchored herself to the ship’s hull, slowly beginning to work her way back along the outside of the Alley Oop. Caitlin pushed her way up and out of the lander and tethered herself before taking a moment to look around her. Below, Earth spread out like an incredible, majestic tapestry. The green and brown of the continents slid into the deep blue of the oceans as white clouds floated above them. In all her time spent in space, she’d never actually taken the time to appreciate what her home world looked like from up above, so small and helpless, a glass ornament suspended above a yawning black abyss.

  “Now just remember, we have to be careful out here,” warned Caitlin. “Material that they blasted off from the asteroid could still be floating around. It could come up from anywhere and tag us before we know it.”

  “I’ll be sure to duck,” Vee promised.

  Caitlin fired the jets on her suit gently, moving aft until she’d reached the tail end of the craft, where Vee was already waiting. Once Caitlin was there, she and Vee grabbed on and positioned themselves to ensure the best possible thrust.

  “OK, girl,” Vee said to Caitlin. “This is your show.”

  “You ready to do this?” Caitlin asked.

  “Let’s go,” Vee said. “Starting thrusters now.”

  With precise, gradual movements, the two women began firing the thrusters on their suits, first to port, then starboard, then forward and aft. Whatever direction Caitlin and Vee needed the ship to move in at that moment, they were able to guide it with expertly timed jets of exhaust. Little by little, as both women worked, the Alley Oop began to respond. It was stubborn, for sure, but it was beginning to come around. Vee shouted triumphantly.

  “Ha ha!” she exulted. “She’s starting to give up the fight. I knew we’d get her to turn around! I knew we—”

  Before she could finish, a small shower of micrometeorites, no doubt remnants of rock broken from the Thresher, collided with Vee, slicing through her tether and knocking her off the Alley Oop. The larger pieces were followed by a school of smaller rocks that peppered the hull of the ship like bullet hits, many of them punching through and damaging the craft irreparably. It was only through sheer luck that one of them hadn’t torn through Caitlin herself. She pulled her way along the Alley Oop, using the damaged craft as a makeshift shield against the barrage of micrometeorites and scrabbled her way back inside, calling for Vee over her headset mic.

  “Vee?” she asked, then asked again, this time yelling her name. “Vee!”

  There was only static in response. Frantically, Caitlin looked out of the viewport and saw a sight that made her stomach turn. Vee turning helplessly end over end as she tumbled away from the ship and into Earth’s atmosphere.

  “No!” she screamed. “No, God, please no!”

  Grief, anger, and rage swarmed up inside her like a cloud of angry hornets. She pounded the damaged instrument panel, the ceiling, the walls, anything that her fists could get to in her frenzy, screaming and cursing as she did. When the fight had left her, she floated there helpless and alone, crying for her friend and at the notion that she had now completely failed. Her crew was gone. She would never see Emily again. Never set foot on her home planet again. All her efforts, everything she had tried to do, it all had led to this, and it had all been for nothing. The unfairness of it all struck her again and again like waves, crashing over her and threatening to drag her out in their merciless undertow.

  In the second before the grief consumed her, Caitlin had a flash. She thought of late nights, skinned knees, first thunderstorms, and the smell of the street after a summer rainfall. She thought of playing princess, playing doctor, playing soldier, playing at being whoever you wanted to be, even if it wasn’t something real. She thought of flashlight tag in the summer, sleeping beneath too many blankets in the winter. Of wood smoke and firelight and old stories that were retold and new stories that were made up on the spot. Of favorite games and new games that made no sense but existed only because they made you laugh. She thought of learning how to ride a bike, her father holding the seat until she was ready and then letting her go, standing at the end of the street as she rode a little farther away. She thought of all these things in an instant, a lifetime of memories passing in a warm glow.

  She thought of Emily. And she knew she wasn’t done yet.

  Just then, the ship’s master alarm began to blare and the calm, impassive female voice of the main computer began speaking, repeating the same announcement over and over.

  “Danger. Proximity alert. Danger. Proximity alert.”

  Caitlin looked out of the viewport and saw what the computer was talking about. She was getting dangerously close to Earth. She had to act before the ship entered the atmosphere. If she didn’t do something, anything, she was going to be incinerated in a matter of minutes. She recalled sitting in Ross’s office in what felt like another lifetime, and hearing him talk about a “zero-limit” option. It didn’t make sense to her at the time, but she thought that, if anyone on Earth, the Moon, or anywhere in between was at the so-called zero limit, it had to be her.

  Screw it.

  Caitlin floated to the back of the s
hip, breathing heavily and pushing herself along the walls as the alarm blared and the computer continued its three-word intonation. Shedding her EMU suit, she quickly slid into one of the drop suits. It cinched around her body like the counterpressure outfits she’d worn on the Moon. Sleek and aerodynamic, the drop suits were designed for a last-minute bailout from a damaged spacecraft above Earth. That last part was key. Earth. The suits had only been designed to function once the wearer had entered the atmosphere, as no one had yet been able to create a suit capable of withstanding the intense heat and friction of reentry. Searching quickly through the ship’s supplies, Caitlin’s eyes finally landed on the object she was looking for.

  “Oh, good,” she said in a strangely detached voice. “They have a MOOSE.”

  Proposed by General Electric in the 1960s, the MOOSE (Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment) was basically a foam-filled bag that could act as a makeshift reentry vehicle, carrying a single astronaut to Earth in the event of a catastrophe in space. The MOOSE worked simply, with the astronaut climbing inside the bag outside of the damaged ship and filling it with foam. The craft would then use a small rocket engine to deorbit before plummeting back to Earth, with the MOOSE protecting the occupant using the foam and its small heat shield. Neither NASA nor the air force was interested in the MOOSE at the time, but as travel to and from Earth became more commonplace, the idea had been revisited at the turn of the last century and they’d been increasingly seen on in-and-outbound spaceflights.

  Yanking the MOOSE, still in its suitcase, from the emergency locker, Caitlin pushed her way forward until she reached the hatch. She depressurized the cabin and stepped outside. Below her was Earth, unfurling in a riot of color. In a flash, she thought of a verse from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book she still had every intention of reading to her daughter.