Velocity

by Steve Worland

  ‘I was just being friendly. Making conversation.’

  ‘Of course.’ Judd studies the dusty ground beneath his feet. ‘I’m just a little stressed.’

  ‘These people are trying to kill me too you know.’

  ‘Sure, but I have —’

  Thump-thump-thump-thump.

  The sound of the rotors surrounds them.

  ‘You have what?’

  Judd looks at him. ‘The woman I love is orbiting the Earth in the hijacked space shuttle which, I’m pretty sure, is going to land out here somewhere and I need to tell the authorities about it but I’m stuck in the middle of a crater with a busted helicopter and I’ll be dead before I can get to a place that has a working phone.’

  Corey takes it in with a nod. ‘Okay, you’re excused. And I did bang on a bit so, sorry about that —’ He stops abruptly.

  ‘What?’

  The Australian points his index finger skyward. ‘It’s going away.’

  Judd listens. It’s true. The sound retreats. ‘What happened?’

  Corey lets out a short laugh. ‘It flew by.’

  ‘It flew by? It was so loud.’

  ‘Sound got caught in the crater, bounced around, amplified.’

  Judd can’t contain his elation. He shuffles his feet as he clenches his fists in triumph. It looks odd but has a certain groove to it. ‘It flew on by!’

  ‘And we ain’t gonna die!’ Corey laughs. ‘You’re dancing like Barry Manilow.’

  Judd stops. ‘What?’

  ‘Barry Manilow. You know, the stutter-step thing, when he sings “Copacabana”.’ Corey imitates the Manilow trot, complete with imaginary maracas. ‘I saw him do it on TV when I was a kid.’

  ‘I wasn’t doing that.’

  ‘Sure you were.’

  Spike barks.

  Corey nods at the dog. ‘He agrees.’

  Judd’s mood turns. Nothing like being compared to a seventies cabaret performer to kill the moment. Corey tries his best to walk it back. ‘It’s not an insult. Manilow’s a big star in certain areas —’

  ‘How soon till we can get out of here?’

  Corey moves back to the Loach. ‘I’m on it. Can you pass me stuff from the toolbox?’

  Judd nods as Corey slides his head into the Loach’s rear hatch. ‘Hairspray.’ His voice resonates.

  Judd searches the toolbox, locates a rusting can of Taft, places it in Corey’s outstretched hand. ‘I hope you’re only using dealer-approved parts.’

  ‘Hey, if it works.’ Corey extends a hand. ‘Lighter.’

  Judd passes over a disposable. He hears the lighter being flicked to life then the roar of a flame. A stream of black smoke billows out as the Australian coughs.

  ‘Hammer!’

  Judd passes it over.

  ‘Thanks, Mandy.’ Corey proceeds to whack something hard.

  ‘Did you call me “Mandy”?’

  ‘It’s your nickname.’

  ‘Excuse me? Why would you call me “Mandy”?’

  “‘I Write The Songs” doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. You know, Barry Manilow’s song “Mandy” —’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Don’t call me that. Really.’

  ‘You don’t get to pick your nickname. I didn’t pick mine.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you want to know what it is?’

  ‘Not really —’

  ‘Blades.’ The Australian says it in a breathy, portentous voice that reverberates in the hatch. ‘I know it’s better than Mandy, but then I don’t dance like Barry Manilow.’

  ‘I don’t dance like —’ Frustrated, Judd stops and looks up at the darkening sky. ‘How much longer is this going to take?’

  ‘Settle, Mandy. Precision workmanship takes time.’ The hammering resumes.

  **

  Twelve minutes later the day-glo-yellow Loach knifes across the burning horizon.

  Judd surveys the orange sky, searches for the black chopper. He sees nothing so he takes in the sunset, remembers the last time he witnessed a view so vivid. He was standing on the Kona Coast, holding hands with Rhonda, eight years ago. He remembers how different, how much better, they’d been away from Houston. Spontaneous. Happy. He can’t remember feeling that way since .. .

  Jesus H! He can feel moisture at the corner of his eye. He pokes his index finger under his Ray-Bans to check. Yep, wet. What the hell’s gotten into him? He’s about to Costner again. He takes a breath and reins in the emotion, stops it before it begins.

  The dog barks.

  Corey replies: ‘Well, you’ll just have to man up and deal with it, won’t you?’

  Judd turns to the Australian. ‘Deal with what?’

  ‘Your crying. It embarrasses him.’

  Judd flushes red. ‘I’m not - there’s no - I just - I got some dust in my eye.’

  The Australian nods with an I-don’t-believe-you face and Judd turns away, notices the collection of old cassette tapes strewn across the cabin’s floor. He picks up a couple, studies them. ‘Billy Ocean, Richard Marx, Def Leppard. I love this stuff. This is the music from when I was a kid. I’m surprised we have the same taste.’

  ‘I use them to scare the cattle when I’m mustering.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t like any of these?’

  ‘Billy’s okay. I guess after the Pacific he’d be my favorite ocean. Not that I’ve ever seen the Pacific. I mean I’ve seen pictures, of course, but never, you know, the real thing, in its full watery-ness. I’m not sure that’s a word.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ Judd places the cassettes in a rusty metal bucket that sits in the passenger’s foot well.

  ‘Don’t put ‘em in there. That’s my lucky bucket. Just put ‘em on the floor.’

  Judd nods and does as he’s told. A moment passes then curiosity gets the better of him. ‘Why is the bucket lucky?’

  ‘It’s always where I need it. It never leaks. It’s useful for carrying stuff.’

  ‘Does that make it lucky or just doing the job is was designed for?’

  ‘Both, I think.’ Corey glances in the side mirror, checks for signs of the black chopper. He doesn’t see anything. ‘So, you’re an astronaut, huh?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Cool. Ever fly on the space shuttle?’

  ‘I piloted it.’ Judd doesn’t include ‘once’. He doesn’t want to be that guy here. In Houston there was no choice, he was a one-hit wonder, but he didn’t have to be here.

  ‘What was the best bit?’

  Judd’s surprised to realise no one’s ever asked him that before. Even so, he knows the answer straight away. ‘The view.’

  ‘Really? What was so good?’

  ‘There’s so much of it.’ Judd takes a breath, stares out at the sunset contemplatively. ‘When I was looking at the Earth from up there, well, I’ve never really believed in a god but that was the closest I came.’

  ‘You’re not gonna cry again, are you?’

  ‘It was dust!’

  Spike barks, lifts a paw, points out the windscreen. On the ground in the far distance a cluster of lights blink and twinkle.

  Judd focuses on it. ‘Is that the dish?’

  Corey nods. ‘Sure is, Mandy, sure is.

  **

  23

  ‘Where the hell is it?’

  Henri stares out the shuttle’s windscreen at the black void of space. It’s not where it should be.

  Beside him Nico works the rotational controller, fires the external thrusters, swings Atlantis to the right. ‘It should be right here.’

  It should be but it’s not. Henri glances at the screen in front of him and confirms what he already knows: they’re low on fuel. They’re burning through the thrusters’ helium supply at an alarming rate. There’s barely a quarter left in the tank. If they don’t find it soon they’ll have to abandon the search and the mission will have failed because they cannot run out of helium. If they do they won’t be abl
e to position Atlantis for re-entry and the spacecraft will burn up as soon as it hits the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Henri studies the MacBook and the tracking program that tells him it should be right here, that Atlantis should be parked on top of it. He looks out the windscreen again, scans the infinite blackness.

  ‘There.’ He points at a glint of light in the distance.

  Nico pushes Atlantis towards it.

  The trip towards the glinting object seems to take an age so his thoughts turn, as they so often do, to his wife. He remembers the last time he saw her. That was the night he kept coming back to, the evening they spent in Chicago, seven hours stolen from their hectic schedules. They had ordered room service and watched a movie in bed and made love and fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

  The morning, however, had not been so wonderful. Henri remembers her silence as they stepped out of the lobby, her cool peck on his cheek as he opened the taxi door, and the fact she didn’t look back as it pulled away from the curb. What he can’t remember is what their argument had been about. They quarrelled so rarely that he should remember, but he doesn’t. What he does remember is that the last time he saw his wife they had had an argument about something he can’t remember and there is no way he can ever take that back.

  ‘That’s it.’ Nico’s relieved voice pulls Henri out of the moment. The Frenchman blinks then focuses on the large metal cylinder that floats before them. That cylinder is the reason they are here.

  It is a RORSAT, or Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite. Between 1967 and 1988 the USSR launched thirty-three RORSATs to coincide with US and NATO naval manoeuvres. Parked in a 220-kilometre orbit above the Earth, they surveyed the oceans around the clock as the Kremlin’s eye in the sky.

  The RORSATs were, in the time-honoured tradition of Soviet-era technology, breathtakingly inefficient. Their power supply lasted barely ninety days. Once depleted, a rocket booster inserted the RORSAT into a storage orbit a further 650 kilometres up. At that altitude they would not re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere for another 600 years. Suffice to say, after reaching storage orbit the RORSATs were promptly forgotten. But not by Henri.

  Even by the Soviet’s modest standards the RORSATs had a poor success rate. Of the thirty-three satellites launched, four malfunctioned before they reached storage orbit. Three re-entered the atmosphere, broke up and crashed back to Earth. One lobbed into the Pacific Ocean north of Japan in 1973, another crash-landed in the Canadian Northwest Territories in 1978 and a third plopped into the South Atlantic Ocean in 1983.

  The fourth defective RORSAT was launched in late 1987. After it exhausted its power supply the satellite’s primary propulsion system failed to push it into storage orbit. The backup did fire, but lifted it into an incorrect orbit 80 kilometres below its intended altitude. Over the following decades the satellite’s orbit steadily decayed. It was due to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime in early 2017.

  Henri stares at the RORSAT as they glide towards it. He has painstakingly tracked it for the last three years. It is 11 metres long, a metre and half wide and could only be Russian. Ungainly, inelegant and fussy, it instantly offends the Frenchman’s refined sense of design. Six long, spindly antennae protrude from a fuselage covered in the dull grey paint Soviets favoured for their military hardware.

  Atlantis’s external control thrusters fire and swing it towards the satellite. Nico gently works the controller, eyes glued to the monitor in front of him. It displays three views of the satellite fed by three cameras inside Atlantis’s payload bay. The shuttle edges closer, parallel but slightly below the RORSAT, no more than six metres away.

  ‘How’s that?’ Nico’s question is directed at Martie Burnett.

  ‘Fine, hold it there.’

  The thrusters fire once more and the shuttle holds station. Henri turns to Martie, his gaze steady. ‘You’re up.’

  Feet secure in velcro floor straps that stop her floating away, Martie stands at the rear of the flight deck and studies a small video monitor within the instrument panel. It displays the same three images of the Russian satellite that Henri and Nico see.

  She raises her eyes from the monitor and looks out the cabin’s rear window at the Canadarm, a remote-controlled robotic manipulator connected to the inside of the shuttle’s payload bay. Designed and built, unsurprisingly, by Canadians, it resembles a human arm, except it’s 15 metres long and 40 centimetres wide. Articulated at its shoulder, elbow and wrist, the giant white appendage ends in a clever mechanical device called the effector.

  Martie believes the Canadarm is the most important system on the shuttle. Without it the spacecraft is just an expensive crane without a hook. She can grab anything with the effector. On her two previous trips to orbit she’d snagged a communications satellite, the Hubble, even an errant toolbox. She’d never missed.

  She works the hand controller located on the panel before her with smooth, direct movements and watches the Canadarm rise from its resting place. It eases across the shuttle’s open bay doors then reaches into the darkness. She triggers a switch and the image on the monitor flicks to a view from a camera positioned on the effector.

  Martie scans the satellite for a point to attach. If she touches it but doesn’t grab hold it could scoot away and they’ll have to chase it. Considering how long it took to find she knows they don’t have the fuel for that. So she can’t miss. She’d promised Henri she could do this and she won’t let him down.

  Martie watches the monitor intently as the effector moves, scans the satellite’s cylindrical body. Around its midsection are a series of large bolts, each about eight centimetres high. One of them looks like a promising target to latch onto. She moves the effector towards it.

  Henri studies the monitor. He knows how important this moment is. He’s invested millions of his own money, years of his time and co-opted his crew all for this moment, so he needs the next two minutes to go smoothly. He turns, watches Martie as she focuses on the monitor and moves the hand controller. She is the centrepiece around which the mission was built. Hers was the perfect confluence of skill and circumstance. If she had rebuffed him when he first sought to recruit her then they wouldn’t be here and none of this would be possible.

  He takes a deep breath, forces himself to relax. He knows she’s done this many times before. She’ll be fine.

  ‘Shit!’ Martie stares at the monitor and says it again. ‘Shit.’ The effector grabbed the bolt. Then she tightened its hold to pull the satellite towards the payload bay and the bolt snapped off, sending the satellite into a slow spin.

  She releases the broken bolt from the effector, sends it flipping away, then searches for another spot to grab on. One that won’t snap.

  She doesn’t notice the longest of the satellite’s six antennae until it rotates into view and slams into the Canadarm, sends a shock wave through the shuttle. ‘Damn.’ The antenna lies across the Canadarm as the satellite continues to rotate. The antenna bends. Martie wills it to snap.

  It doesn’t. The bent antenna springs back into shape and spins the satellite in the opposite direction, drives it away from the shuttle. Fast.

  If she doesn’t grab it now they won’t get it back. By the time Nico can swing the shuttle around it’ll be so far away they won’t have the fuel to retrieve it.

  Martie searches the satellite, looks for another spot to grab on. In six seconds it’ll be out of reach.

  She jams the hand controller forward. The effector darts towards the satellite, reaches the end of its range, clamps down on one of the antennae as it swings past.

  The satellite stops spinning but its momentum swings it underneath the Canadarm. The antenna bends, and bends - and snaps.

  ‘Christ.’ The satellite tumbles towards Atlantis. If it hits it’ll punch a hole in the fuselage and the instant depressurisation will mean a gruesome death for everyone on board.

  The satellite’s 10 metres away and moves quickly. Martie flicks the han
d controller. The Canadarm flips up, pivots, and the effector releases the broken antenna. The satellite’s five metres away. The Canadarm shoots towards it. Three metres away. The effector clamps onto the satellite’s rear sensor hub. One metre away. The Canadarm draws it to a stop. Ten centimetres from Atlantis.

  Everyone stares out the windscreen at the satellite, shocked by how close it is, relieved it isn’t closer.

  Martie releases a long breath and nods to Henri, who returns that half-smile of his. She looks back at the monitor and gently works the hand controller. The Canadarm draws the satellite away from the shuttle, swings it around and deposits it in the payload bay.