by R Davison
Mission Control broke in. “The experts down here think that the ejection mechanism on the probe can be triggered manually. Jill could ride up with the satellite and trip the ejector once it’s in position.”
“What do you think about a little ride, Jill?” Susan asked.
“Hey, sounds like fun! With the clamp-on footrest I should be able to get in position to trip the ejector.”
“Houston, did you copy that?” Susan asked, all the while feeling more apprehensive. She could feel her stomach turning into a knot and was feeling slightly nauseous.
“Susan, we got that. We will work up a checklist for the manual launch. It should not take too long.”
“Copy that,” Susan responded. “We’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”
Jerry carefully brought the satellite back down into the payload bay and Jill proceeded to secure the footrest on the shuttle’s arm. Susan took advantage of the break to give Paul some time on his experiment. Within a few minutes, Mission Control sent up instructions to Jill and she began the preparations on the satellite.
Susan finished another round with Paul and glided over to see if she could help Jill. “How is it going?” Susan asked as she closely examined the satellite for the first time. She was very curious to see how it had weathered being in space for over a year. As far as she could see, there was nothing obvious to indicate that it had been exposed to the rigors of space for such a length of time, except that the exposed metal parts were not quite as shiny as she thought they might be.
“I’ve almost got the last screw out of the cover plate…there, that’s it.” Jill carefully stowed the screws and the cover plate in a pouch Velcroed to her suit. She peered inside the assembly and with the screwdriver started to explore the mechanism. “It looks like the grease that was used to lubricate this has plasticized. It’s quite hard.”
“We copy that, Jill,” Mission Control said, “can you see the ejector spring below the probe shaft on the right?”
“Ah…wait, I need some more light here. Susan, can you help me with the light?”
“Sure,” Susan turned on a flashlight and directed the beam down inside the probe assembly, “How’s that?”
“Great. Yes, I can see the ejector spring and the release trigger is just at the end of the spring.” Jill breathed a sigh of relief at her discovery.
“Good work, Jill. Now remember when you trip the trigger you may need to prod the spring if the lubricant is too stiff.”
“Roger that, Mission Control. I think that may be the case, this stuff is really stiff! I think that I’m all set to go for a ride.”
“I’m ready when you are, Jill,” Jerry said. “Be sure to observe the fasten your seat belts and no smoking sign. And, as always, thank you for flying Jerry’s space arm!”
“You keep that up and I am going to cash in my ticket!” Jill quipped.
Susan helped Jill step into the footrest. She then attached a safety strap from Jill to the arm and double-checked her tether. While she was securing Jill’s safety strap, Susan realized that her hands were shaking and she was breathing rapidly. Again she felt the gnawing pain in her stomach. Susan tried to focus on Jill and cursed under her breath as sweat from her forehead migrated to her eyes. She quickly looked out of the payload bay and scanned the velvety blackness of space, but saw nothing.
“Susan, is everything all right?” Jill asked with a bit of concern in her voice, “Did I drop something?”
“No…Everything’s okay. Just taking in the view,” Susan replied, trying to collect herself. Come on, keep your head in the game, she reprimanded herself.
“Come on you two, we have a train to catch. Let us get that satellite back into orbit.” Ivan’s voice came over the intercom and put Susan a bit at ease.
“We’re all set here, I think. Jill, you ready?”
“All set. Any time, Jerry.”
“Hang on, Jill, I am going to raise the arm now.”
Susan stepped back as Jill and SCIEXSAT were slowly raised out of the bay. As Susan watched Jill leave the bay, she was feeling more and more uneasy. If she could have hidden someplace, she would have gladly done so. The harder Susan tried to concentrate on Jill and the task at hand, the more the image of the black beast surging out of the deep clouded her thoughts. She found herself pressing up against the bulkhead of the payload bay, grabbing the insulation that covered it and cowering in the corner. She watched Jill, high above the bay, as if through a fog. Only faintly did she hear the conversation Jill was having with Mission Control.
“Roger that. I am going to trip the trigger.”
Susan’s heart was beating faster and louder. She couldn’t hear the pumps and motors in her suit any longer. Her breathing was coming in short gasps. She knew it was coming…it was almost here…she could feel it… she couldn’t swim away…it was too late!
“Ivannnnnn…!” Susan heard herself scream as she pulled herself further into the corner of the payload bay, trying to crouch down to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible. Her mind was racing and the next half second unwrapped itself in hideous slow motion. Susan watched in terror as high above the payload bay the leading edge of the monster—jagged, black, tortured and cratered—made its appearance. Racing silently by, it kept coming. It grew darker in the payload bay as the asteroid passed between the shuttle and Earth, blotting out the light reflected from the planet. The asteroid was slowly rotating, as it had for eons. This rotation, combined with the jagged shape of the asteroid, gave the illusion that the monster was beginning to reach out toward the shuttle, stretching out a fin or arm, to catch whatever was there. Susan crouched lower in the cargo bay, straining the joints in her suit until they groaned under the stress. The appendage grew closer and closer until the very tip of it grazed the top of the shuttle sending a deadly cloud of shattered tiles toward the back of the payload bay. The spray of ceramic shrapnel shredded the insulation on the back and sidewall of the bay and the jacket on the shuttle arm. The shower of debris in turn shattered tiles that covered the shuttle’s engine pods and rudder. Several larger pieces of debris punched holes through the rudder.
Susan flinched as a piece of tile grazed her visor. She wanted to scream, to warn Jill to look out, but was frozen with fear. Little did she realize that this was happening so fast that it was over before she could utter her first word.
The behemoth continued its rotation and the fin reached out and snatched Jill away. Jill was focused on the satellite and never knew what was coming. The shuttle arm on which Jill was standing was ripped from its mount on the shuttle bay wall leaving behind a jagged wound. A cloud of fragments that had once made up the base of the arm floated in the bay. The force of the collision, combined with the gravitational tug from the asteroid, started the shuttle tumbling out of control, pulling the nose upward toward the asteroid as well as causing the shuttle to rotate about its centerline.
Miles of asteroid blazed by in a wink of an eye at almost a hundred thousand miles an hour and it took Jill along with it as it bore on toward its rendezvous with Earth. Susan gasped as Jill disappeared before her eyes, and watched horrified as the beast literally punched a hole into the atmosphere. The air, being pushed aside by the asteroid, glowed red as it was compressed and superheated. The asteroid itself began to glow as the superheated air started to heat its outer surface. Soon it also began to tumble as its leading edge slowed faster than its trailing edge in the thickening atmosphere. Susan watched the sight, unable to take her eyes off the asteroid until the shuttle’s own tumbling and spinning turned her view from the Earth to the darkness of space and back again, giving her glimpses of the disaster taking place. The point of entry was quickly being taken out of view by the shuttle’s orbital motion. The last thing Susan saw, or thought she saw, was the asteroid splitting into several pieces.
The asteroid fragmented into three large chunks, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, from the stress of its rapid deceleration in the denser, lower atmosphere, and they began to
separate from each other. Two pushed their way deeper into the atmosphere and on toward the Atlantic coastline of the United States. The third piece, Gamma, flatter but larger than its siblings, lifted above the others and shot back into space like a stone skipping across the surface of a calm lake.
IV
“What the hell happened?” Ivan shouted over the noise of alarm bells and buzzers as he struggled to regain control of the shuttle. Having been strapped into the pilot’s seat, he fared better than Jerry and Paul when the shuttle departed from its normal flight path. They found themselves colliding with the nearest wall, ceiling or floor, as the shuttle turned without them because of the lack of gravity. Jerry managed to pull himself back up to the arm station. Paul was on the middeck, floating unconscious after a collision with the bulkhead.
“Jesus! What was that? Ivan, what the hell is going on? Did we have another thruster malfunction?” Jerry yelled. As he pulled himself up and peered out of the viewport, Jerry knew it was more than a thruster malfunction. “Oh my God! She’s gone. The whole goddamn arm is gone! Susan!! Jill!! Do you copy?”
“What do you mean the arm is gone,” Ivan called, still fighting to bring the shuttle’s wild tumbling under control.
“The damn arm is gone! Nothing’s left and I don’t see Jill or Susan…Susan!! Jill!! Can you hear me?” After a few moments of silence Jerry suddenly realized that they had not heard from Paul either. He keyed the intercom, “Paul, do you copy? Paul, are you all right, do you copy?” Jerry was hanging on as best as he could while the shuttle began to slowly respond to Ivan’s inputs on the steering thrusters.
“Christ!” came Ivan’s only reply. He had his hands full trying to stabilize the shuttle from its disorienting tumble. “Hang on, Jerry…I’ve almost got…this…under control.”
Jerry could feel the shuttle slowing from its end-over-end tumble, and shortly thereafter its wild rotation was tamed. He was glad Ivan was in the pilot’s seat, because if it were up to him, the shuttle would be doomed, he thought.
“Susan, Jill, do you copy? Can you hear me?” Jerry’s gaze drifted from the payload bay, to the control panel for the arm, searching for something to re-establish his sense of reality but only finding disbelief in the moment at hand. No simulations had prepared him for this! Slowly he emerged from the mental haze and confusion and realized that there was nothing he could do at the moment for Susan and Jill. He made his way down to the middeck to look for Paul.
As the shuttle tumbled, Susan found herself pinned against the bulkhead where she had cowered. Slowly she came out of the fog of the last moments and began to realize that there were real voices calling out to her: it was not a dream. She looked around the cargo bay through her damaged visor at the torn, tattered insulation and padding and noticed that the arm was no longer on the wall across from her and neither was Jill: just a stubby remnant of her tether slowly gyrated back and forth. Her brain now replayed the events of the last thirty seconds in excruciating detail, and she found herself shaking uncontrollably. The sound of Ivan and Jerry’s voices brought some comfort to her and she finally found enough strength to reply to their calls.
“I’m here,” Susan’s quavering voice came as a whisper.
“Susan! Are you all right” Ivan called out, “Is Jill okay?”
“Ah, I’m okay. Jill…” Susan’s voice trailed off as the reality of Jill’s demise sank in.
“Susan, what about Jill?” Jerry asked.
Susan tried to focus and pulled herself upright. The scar the tile fragment left on her visor distorted her view of the bay, and combined with the fears of the moment, made her very sick to her stomach. “Ah…Jill’s gone…It took her.”
“Oh, God,” she heard Jerry mutter, “What do you mean, ‘it took her’? What took her?” he spoke louder, getting more impatient with not knowing what happened.
Ivan cut in, “Susan, can you make it inside? Are you injured?”
“I think…ahh…I think I can get back in,” Susan was having trouble getting her body moving. Slowly she began to feel the strength flow back into her arms and legs.
“I will suit up and come out to help you,” Ivan said.
“No, I think I can make it…just give me a minute.”
“Jerry, can you see Paul,” Ivan asked.
“Yes, I’m with him. He must have hit the wall when we tumbled and was out for a few minutes. He might have a slight concussion, but he’s conscious now. What’s our status, Ivan?”
“We are showing an internal pressure drop, I think we are venting cabin air somewhere. We should get into our pressure suits until we can locate the leak. The ship is finally stabilized and we have a number of other warning lights on systems that have been reset. I think a lot of those are related to the damaged arm and the payload bay.”
“Have you talked to Mission Control?” Jerry asked.
“I had them on the line just before we started to spin and all I have now is static. I am not sure if the whole communications system is down, there are no alarms showing for it.”
“Susan is on her way in,” Jerry said. “I’ll give her a hand and we’ll come up.”
The people spending the day on the beaches of sunny Florida had no idea that their world was going to come to an end in a cataclysmic event the likes of which the world has not seen in sixty million years. The warm breeze that blew in from the ocean mingled with the sounds of children playing in the crashing surf. Beach-goers basked in the sun while they listened to their radios and MP3 players; strains of rock and roll intermingled with booming pulses of rap, accented with wisps of a violin concerto from another terry-toweled oasis on the beach. People talked to each other, shouted and laughed while others read or just snoozed. Those temporary beach dwellers who were more active or observant, and were not focusing on other distractions the beach provided, noticed a very bright spot of light in the east. It rapidly split into three dots of light with one of them fading while the other two grew brighter, bigger and separated farther apart. In a matter of seconds, the closest ball of fire again split and pushed a large bright chunk tumbling downward toward the sea. These unfortunate people never had time to comprehend what they were seeing, never felt the impact of rock on the Earth.
The half-mile-long chunk of the Alpha fragment crashed into the Atlantic, fifty miles from shore, while the main piece continued over the shoreline. The shockwave of super-heated, compressed air that preceded the asteroid leveled everything in a swath over fifty miles wide on either side of its path. The main piece of Alpha impacted land several miles inland creating an oblong crater that stretched almost a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide. The impact literally severed Florida, or what was left of it, from the mainland of North America: Florida would forever now be an island. The debris from the impact was ejected with such force that millions of tons of rock reached into low orbit. Most of it would rain down on the Earth thousands of miles away. Other pieces would stay in orbit until the atmospheric drag slowed them down enough to fall back to Earth as shooting stars. The bulk of the debris was thrown westward into the Caribbean and toward southern part of Alabama.
The portion of the Alpha fragment that landed in the Atlantic punched a hole in the ocean that was almost fifteen miles in diameter, creating tsunamis that flooded deep into the eastern coastline of the United States, and almost completely washed over central Florida. The deadly waves continued far up the coast to the north hitting Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, obliterating towns and villages surrounding the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and Placentia and Hermitage Bays in Newfoundland. Vaporized water funneled up the corridor formed in the atmosphere by the asteroid’s fiery entry and was deposited high in the upper atmosphere.
The Beta fragment continued further west, boosted by the impact blast from the Alpha fragment. It finally crashed in Texas, between Houston and Austin. This being the largest piece of the monster to land, it created the largest impact crater extending more than one hundred miles long by almost eighty miles wide.
It, like its brethren, hit at a shallow angle and sent the bulk of its ejecta on low trajectories westward into Mexico and New Mexico.
Susan had made her way across the bay to the airlock. Pushing aside some debris that was floating in front of the hatch, she entered the airlock but turned back to take one last look at the payload bay before she closed the hatch. She looked at the shattered cargo bay and saw the damage but nothing really registered in her mind. Susan blinked to clear her vision and reached to pull the hatch closed. With quivering muscles she strained to close the hatch and then stared dumbly at the indicator panel, which showed that the hatch seal was not secure. She pulled on her tether to make sure that it was not caught in the door seal but it was free and floating about her. Susan pushed the hatch open and looked out in the cargo bay. Her eyes caught some movement in the bay and as she focused on it, she realized that it was Jill’s tether still attached to its mount on the airlock. With a tug, Susan pulled the tether into the airlock and closed the hatch. As she waited for the airlock to pressurize, she held Jill’s tether, stroking it softly with the thick gloves of her space suit. She could not feel it, yet she drew comfort just from holding the last physical connection they had to Jill. She closed her eyes and could feel her strength returning. As Susan thought about the last few hours of her life, she found herself getting more and more angry that she had not followed her intuition. She did not contemplate what she would have done differently, that was for another place and time, when she had time on her hands. All she knew now is that Jill would still be alive had she acted on her feelings. This surge of anger brought Susan’s strength back even quicker, and by the time Jerry opened the hatch on the other side she was ready to do something about the mess they were in.
Jerry was startled when he saw the damaged visor on Susan’s helmet. He didn’t say anything but could not help thinking how lucky she was, that whatever did this damage glanced off her helmet and was not a direct hit. He helped her out of her suit and noticed how drained and pale she looked. Paul was up and about with a bandage on his forehead from his encounter with the wall. He gave Jerry a hand removing Susan’s suit.
