So the EverRest Cryotorium orbited low over the Earth, surviving on its own stripped-down automatic systems and a good layer of insulating foam. The hull and its inhabitants were long forgotten by all but a handful of individuals: some who appeared in court on a monthly basis, and some who worked daily in the NASA Department of Decaying Orbital Artifacts—the "Trash Squad."
However, with the unaccustomed surge of electromagnetic noise that was echoing throughout the inner solar system, and with the ensuing panic as normally talkative human beings discovered that their multiplex communications system was effectively blanked out, no one happened to be looking at the sky. Not even the bureaucrats of NASA were wondering what else the surge of random electromagnetic energy might accomplish.
Unappreciated by these people, for the past twenty minutes or so the ionosphere 500 kilometers under the EverRest's keel had been absorbing huge blasts of intense ultraviolet radiation from the recent solar flare.
The air density at such a height above the Earth's surface is quite thin: ranging from two millionths down to five billionths of a gram per cubic meter. While this is hardly detectable as an atmosphere, much less as a breathable medium, still the tenuous upper reaches of the planet's "ocean of air" do exist. Their component particles—mostly ionized atoms of light gases, rather than whole molecules—have mass and obey physical principles, among them the laws of equilibrium. That is to say, the molecular fragments remain at their current altitude because the collective collisions of their gas pressure, energized by the sun's radiation, propel them upward against the pull of gravity.
It is a simple equation in high-school physics: heat the gas, and you increase its pressure. Without confining walls or a steel tank to contain it, the volume of the gas will then expand.
Over the twenty-odd minutes since the first wave of flare-induced electromagnetic energy swept past the Earth, the continuous influx of high-energy radiation had tripled the ambient temperature of the lower ionosphere. The resulting swell in the volume of gas pushed upward, increasing the density of material in EverRest's immediate vicinity by about fifty times.
The effect was immediate.
The orbiting hull reacted as if it had hit a wall.
In just five minutes, the platform had lost 800 meters in altitude. Riding now in relatively thicker air, its speed decreased even further as the gas pressure around it increased.
The blunt leading edge of the cylindrical hull began to buffet, then to vibrate. Without stabilizing jets, the hull up-ended. Without aerodynamic surfaces or other controls, it found no equilibrium in this new attitude either, and so it turned over again. In a few more seconds, the platform was tumbling uncontrollably.
The uneven heating of air-braking under these conditions created stresses in the hull's outside layers that the platform's designers had never anticipated. Seams began to sweat and tear. Panels worked against each other, compressing and flexing the internal plating.
Like a brick bouncing down a flight of stairs, the EverRest platform found successively lower and slower orbits. As it passed into the evening dusk over West Africa, the hull's periods of temporary equilibrium between inertia and friction descended from whole minutes to mere seconds.
At just over 475 kilometers in altitude and traversing southern Tanzania, the platform's exterior was beginning to heat up. That, too, the designers had never expected.
By the time it was down to 200 kilometers, the hull's outer layers were glowing a dull red.
Passing 100 kilometers and the tip of Madagascar, the EverRest platform was shedding pieces of itself. More spectacularly, its speed—still in excess of 20,000 kilometers per hour—was fragmenting the denser air at this altitude, breaking up molecules instead of simply pushing them aside. The result was a blazing trail of hot, ionized gases mixed with incandescent bits of steel and long-chain polymers.
Inside the EverRest Cryotorium, conditions became chaotic. The liquid-nitrogen baths of the "sleep cases" could no longer maintain a low, even temperature. The chill gases themselves were beginning to boil, breaking pipes and shredding tissues that had no time to thaw.
When the hull opened up, the inrush of superheated air quickly incinerated everything organic, as well as any metals that had a melting point below 1,300°C.
In the final stage of descent, the remaining fragments slowed remarkably in the thick lower atmosphere. They traded forward motion for vertical, falling at an acceleration of a mere nine-point-eight meters per second squared toward the Indian Ocean.
At last, a few chunks of steel barely larger than a fist and a dusting of cinders reminiscent of the gifts of the Ganges dropped into the sunny blue waters.
Turn
Turn
Turn...
Turn…
Orbital Slot 37-C at 625 Kilometers, March 21, 19:24 UT
When the comm link had gone down, isolating the Day's Ease Geriatric Residence from its groundside computer complex, Megan Patterson, R.N.Ast., had been nearly frantic. The break meant a loss of access to patient billings, payroll, medication scheduling, entertainment, stores inventory and delivery rosters, engineering support, attitude monitoring and control, and a dozen other interactive functions that the station manager could now only guess at.
The three pressurized canisters at the ends of their Y-shaped yoke were just shells. True, they were fitted out with floors and partitions, beds and other furniture, air recirculators and blowers, plumbing and gravitic collection sumps, a hydroponics environmental sink, and various hospital equipment. But the residence satellite had not one independent cyber, no artificially intelligent doctor, not even a handheld calculator. Just timesharing terminals strategically sited around the corridors, in the medical lockers, and at the central office. Terminals that now displayed white static.
Patterson wanted to call someone and complain, but the link had taken out her voice communications, too. That left her with only two orderlies, a cook, and a handyman to yell at, and they had all successfully retreated into the adjoining modules. So Megan sat in her office at the mid-grav level in Unit 2 and stewed.
With her arms folded and her legs crossed at the knee, Patterson tried to contain her anger and frustration. She failed. The thwarted emotion turned into a spasmodic kicking of her suspended foot. Up-down, up-down. It started as a twitch. Soon Megan was staring at the toe of her white shoe, rising and falling beyond the light-blue nylon over her kneecap. Instead of stopping the kick and controlling herself, she pumped it like a girl on a playground swing, pushing higher and harder with each passing minute.
It was the home office, again. Of course. The bean counters had put her in an impossible position, again. They had made her nominally responsible for the entire station, then suspended her on an invisible wire, a beam-cast system that clearly was excessively vulnerable to atmospheric interference. That was what Patterson found so intolerable—being made dependent, and then getting cut off into the bargain.
In a minute, Megan's foot was flying through an arc of more than thirty centimeters. It was thumping the underside of the desk wing and threatening to bounce her out of the chair. That meant it was time to stop this childishness and do something constructive.
Patterson abruptly stilled her foot.
The chair was still bouncing. The desk was still thumping.
What was going on here?
She put a hand on the desk and felt a flutter. Her every sense came alert, and she noticed a deep groaning that seemed to be coming from the walls and floor around her.
Patterson sat upright in alarm. Was this the wobble predicted in the report from Azimuth Partners, Inc., and had it now come early? She thumbed the terminal on her desk to its internal lines and called for her handyman, the station engineer.
"Dilkey? Are you there?"
"Yes, Miz Patterson?" the speaker grid said after a momentary hesitation.
"Do you feel that shaking? Or whatever it is?"
"Unh—I don't think so, ma'am."
"Put you
r hand on the nearest wall, man! It's jumping around like a live eel. I can actually hear something down here in Two."
"Well, ma'am, that don't make no difference. Each of the modules has its own resonant frequency, you know. So whatever you're hearin' over there don't mean we're hearing it over here."
"Damn you, Dilkey, I say the station is shaking itself apart! I want you to find out why."
"And I try and try to tell you I don't know why. What do I know if I can't feel it, hey? I mean, it ain't reasonable to think a man—"
"Patterson out." She closed the circuit with a snap of her thumbnail.
The wobbling got worse. Patterson stood up from her chair, practically floating out of it in the partial gravity, and walked unsteadily to her one window. Those damn windows in the modules had been the station's whole selling point and, according to the API report, one of the reasons its angle of rotation was so screwed up. What she saw when she got her face squarely in front of the opening and was looking out with the widest field of view almost stopped her heart.
Unit 3, the odd module that was twice as long as the other two, was drifting out of place. Its white flank—which in the normal course of things should have been out of sight, well above her head a third of the way around the axis of rotation—now loomed at nearly ninety degrees to her right ear.
Patterson scrunched down, trying to look up past the window's top edge along a line of sight that was almost dead vertical toward the station's hub. She could barely make out the curve of that core module and the tips of its unflexed docking clamps—but that wasn't what she was looking for.
There!
Off to the right, clearly outlined against the white cloud cover on the planet below, were two random loops of high-tension cabling and a bend of the umbilicus, the corrugated dropshaft which carried the elevator, a man-way, and the telecomm and utility connections between the loose module and the hub. As she watched, the curls in the cables grew wider and then recurved on themselves, making four loops now.
Unit 3 was coming down on top of her.
Megan Patterson watched it close the gap with the upper corner of her own module. Even while the rogue unit still had forty meters of clear space, the window she was bracing herself against began sliding off to her right. She pressed her shoulder into the frame, but the window kept going.
Or rather, she was being pulled to the left by some kind of force.
Patterson's formal training in physics was fairly limited, although her qualification for space duty had included schooling in the basic principles of rotational dynamics. If she was moving to the left without any effort on her part, then the room—or this module, or the whole station, depending on circumstances—was actually decelerating. There was no force acting on Patterson's body other than her own inertia; she was stable, it was her enclosed universe that was changing directions.
She glanced back at her desk to confirm the hypothesis. Yes, a book she'd left open there was also moving. It slid leftward, toward the edge, retarded only by the friction of its covers and spine against the desktop.
The movement was gradual, a persistent pressure rather than a rush. For that Patterson could thank the designers, who had wanted to generate the barest fraction of gravity, just a reminder to aged bones and inner ears of which way "down" ought to be. If the builders had spun the station for a full gee of acceleration, Megan would have been thrown against the wall with enough impact to crush her skull and snap her neck.
As it was, the pressure built until she could no longer stabilize herself against the centimeter-wide coaming around the windowframe. When she let go, she drifted at the speed of a brisk walk toward the forward bulkhead. She just had time to get her hands up, palms out with her wrists slack, to absorb the shock.
Patterson struck, rebounded, then floated free, kicking her legs and waving her arms. Whatever spin the station once had was now gone.
WHUMP!
The walls of Megan Patterson's office vibrated like the insides of a churchbell.
Skree-eek!
While the air thumped in her lungs from that sudden overpressure, her ears rang with a tingling, electrifying, spine-binding wail. Like a hydraulic machine tearing apart a piece of sheet metal.
Crunch-grumble.
The wailing died out in a series of bashing thuds which themselves faded like the echo of thunder in a box canyon.
Without being told, Megan figured that Unit 3 had finally caught up with her own module.
Garble
Burble
Warble…
Click!
Day's Ease Holdings, Inc., Hollyville, Delaware, 1:34 p.m. EST
As quickly as the communications had gone out, they came back. One minute the radio horns were searching aimlessly across the sky, receiving nothing but static. The next, an astute listener might hear fragments of voices, screams and cries in the darkness, remaining an utter jumble—but with an edge of sense. Then, an instant later, out came whole words, complete thoughts, even sentences. Of course, nothing picked up where it had left off forty minutes ago. The transmissions were still occasionally marred by fearsome bursts of static and every word hovered at the fringes of panic. But at least the beams were open and functioning again.
Dr. Harry Asher, the on-call physician for the Day's Ease chain of geriatric satellites, listened to the signals coming back. Because of the ongoing interference, he had long ago abandoned the Virtuality™ helmet and gloves that normally put him in the most intimate contact with his patients. He was monitoring now on voice-only, because the static bursts were less disorienting that way. Asher could only hope that, during this unaccounted gap in his shift time, none of his 2,400 patients in orbit had suffered any relapses requiring his attention and advice.
Immediately one light on his board flashed red, indicating an urgent message. It was from the channel tied to Station A18-37C-626. Probably a deader, Asher thought, and the duty nurse was afraid to call it. Such things happened all too often.
He picked up on that channel first, strapping his head into the helmet and tugging on his gloves.
"… Help me!" The signal was still coming in sound-only, so he saw and felt nothing. That left Asher's imagination ample room to read undertones into the voice.
"We're coming apart up here!" the woman's voice bellowed. "The whole shebang is all twisted up and flying around—!"
"Miss—ah—" the doctor clicked into his staff profiles "—ah, Patterson! This is Dr. Asher at Hollyville… Do you have a medical problem?"
"Medical? Sure, it's medical! I've got four hundred old folks puking their guts out because this station has totally lost its spin! And the cure for them, Doctor, isn't gonna be in your specialty. Now get off the line and get me someone from groundside engineering!"
"Ah, Nurse Patterson, I think you may be overstating—"
"Move it, buster!"
From the background noise to the transmission—which could be the returning static, but surely sounded like creaking metal and breaking crockery—Asher began to think the woman might not be hallucinating. He consulted his files again and put through a call to the engineering department.
Luckily, it was long enough after the lunch hour that someone decided to answer him. "Technical Support, Ramirez speaking."
"Ramirez, this is Dr. Asher in Medical Control. We appear to have a developing problem with our residence at 37-C and I—"
"Is this a medical problem?"
"No, the duty nurse seems to think the station has gone off spin."
"Oh, hell! Just another spacesick female. If she's hysterical—"
"I think you'd better talk to her just the same."
"Patch her through."
Asher did so and returned to his board. Two more red lights were winking furiously at him.
Creak!
Crack!
Grate!
Groan!
Orbital Slot 37-C at 625 Kilometers, 19:43 UT
Megan Patterson tried to swim in the suddenly weightles
s environment, pawing at the air with her hands and kicking with her feet when she had nothing better to push or pull against. The compartments and corridors of Unit 2 were filled with floating objects—plates, cups, lumps of food, blobs of tea and coffee and liniment, books and papers, jars of cream and bottles of pills, loose capsules, chairs and their seat cushions, strips of matting, clots of vomit and other human by-products. Some of it struck her in the face. Some of it stuck in her hair. None of it mattered.
The air around her was also filled with human and inhuman sounds. The moanings and mewlings of her terrified patients were overridden by shrieks and growls as the station's three main modules ground against each other and pulled exterior panels off each other's sides. That man on the ground, Ramirez, had told her that none of those sounds mattered, either. Not until she heard a low whistling that might or might not develop into a high-pitched scream.
He had advised her to begin rounding up patients and staff members and get them all up and into the docking hub, because that was physically the strongest module in the structure. She should corral her charges there, he said, then close and seal the inner hatches. Maybe it would survive the thudding and pounding intact.
When she had asked if he was going to order an immediate evacuation, Ramirez had been evasive. "The conditions are not suitable for it at this time," he had said—whatever that might mean. What conditions? she wondered, and how much more unsuitable could they be than right now, with the station tearing itself apart around her ears?
One old man—Cahill, Roger B., 91 years—drifted in front of her, coming halfway out of his roomette. Megan Patterson collared him and drew him along. What she hadn't solved yet was how she was going to get him, or anyone else, up the two-meter-wide corrugated dropshaft between this module and the core. That passage was now twisting around like a snake with a broken back.
"Yawp!" Cahill shouted in her ear. "Why are you—? Where are we going?"
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