by R Davison
Even before Captain Greene’s phone call to the base, aircrews were already in the air in support of the CRV’s return. An hour before the first deorbit window opened, crews for one airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, and two C130 Hercules transports were already briefed on their mission and in the air. The AWACS set up an orbit over the western edge of the Victoria Desert hoping to track the CRV as early as possible upon its approach to the continent, while the two C130s took up stations on either side of the predicted reentry zone further east to increase the chances of sighting the ship. The C130s were flying in counter-rotating orbits, so that one plane would always be facing the direction of the incoming CRV.
These rugged, slow-flying, long-endurance aircraft were carrying an emergency medical team and necessary equipment to allow personnel to parachute into the CRV’s landing site, should it miss the designated landing zone, be it on land or in water. If this were all to happen in daylight, they would have no trouble locating the huge parafoil that would stretch over one hundred and fifty feet from tip-to-tip with the CRV suspended below. Unfortunately, it was about one o’clock in the morning in Australia. They had another four hours before sunrise, and it was raining.
The job for the aircrews would be much more difficult. They had to rely on the CRV’s homing beacon for radio tracking and strobe light for visual identification. The latter would be useless with the heavy cloud cover over the south Pacific until the CRV cleared the lower layers at about eight thousand feet. The radio beacon would help, and they would get radar information from the AWACS, but even so, it would be difficult to find the CRV.
The lead C130, Alpha-Rescue One, was piloted by Squadron Leader Andrew Dunlop, in the left seat. Flight Lieutenant Jasmine Ketchell—or Jazzy, as everyone called her—was acting copilot on the mission, and occupied the right seat in the cockpit. They were on the northern most orbit, while Alpha-Rescue Two established an orbit approximately fifty miles south of them.
The two Hercules transports had clawed their way through the dense cloud layer. Bouncing with the turbulence, they proceeded to climb at maximum power to get above the clouds, which were topping out around twenty thousand. “I hope these astronauts are up for this ride on their way down,” Andrew said to Jazzy in between the thumps and bumps the storm was delving out to them and their aging transport.
“Yeah—” she said, as they hit a particularly violent updraft that pushed them all into their seats, rattling everything in the cockpit. “I don’t know what this is going to do to their parafoil, but it’s not going to be good.”
“Maybe we can warn them once they get through the radio blackout,” said Andrew. “Give the base the low-down on this weather, so they can pass it on to the CRV, and see if they can clear us to a higher altitude. Maybe we can get above this turbulence.” Andrew wrestled with the controls, trying to keep the airplane on course. At this time, he was not being too particular on how tightly he kept his heading. He was just glad that he was still making headway and that all four engines were still running at one hundred percent power. He checked with the flight engineer on their condition and the status of the Hercules and was reassured that everything was running within specifications.
Jazzy switched the radio over from the intercom to the base frequency to give the airbase an update on their position and the weather conditions. Pulling off her headset to give her ears a rest and jotting down some data on the kneepad attached to her flight suit, she reported, “Edinburgh says they just got the latest update on the weather and they aren’t surprised at what we’re going through. They also cleared us to twenty-five thousand,” she said.
“Well, it would have been damn nice if we had those updates before we took off,” Andrew snapped, pushing the throttles forward, trying to squeeze more power out of the engines and urging the plane to climb faster.
Ignoring Andrew’s outburst, Jazzy added, “They said they would pass the information on to the CRV crew as soon as they established contact. Also, based on NORAD’s latest information, they have a new estimate of the location and rendezvous time with the CRV.” She tore the paper off the pad and handed it over her shoulder to Willie, the flight navigator, to calculate a new heading. “Edinburgh thinks we should be seeing them in about twenty minutes, give or take,” she said.
“Well, we should be out of this mess in the next few minutes and things should settle down a bit,” Andrew said, a bit calmer this time. “Check with Alpha-Rescue Two and get a status update on their condition.”
“Will do,” Jazzy replied, as she pulled her headset back on and switched the radio to the assigned frequency for inter-flight communications.
The navigator’s voice popped in over the headphones. “Squadron Leader, we’ve got to come north a bit, heading two-eight-five.”
“Roger, two-eight-five,” Andrew said and slowly adjusted the plane’s heading, noting that the turbulence was already beginning to diminish as they climbed past twenty-three thousand feet.
The International Space Station rapidly left the little CRV behind as it decelerated to drop out of orbit. The space station would pass over Australia long before the rescue vehicle would ever touch down, and by that time the station would be almost a half a world away. Inside the sprawling station, its lone passenger floated in the cupola in a state of shock, oblivious to the alarm bells and flashing lights still active from the pressure loss.
Despite the noise, Susan did not hear anything. Although she continued to stare out the window at the black void, which was framed by the Earth’s atmosphere on one side and the bulkhead around the window on the other, she saw nothing. Her hand was outstretched, reaching for the CRV, but because there was no gravity to pull it down, and because she had no conscious thoughts to pull it back, there it remained. As for thoughts, Susan’s mind only offered her white noise, like the snowy, hissing screen one finds on a TV channel when there is no station broadcasting. The white noise blocked out everything: all thoughts that could hurt or frighten and even thoughts that might lead to a small sliver of happiness, but which could be shredded to pieces once reality returned.
Susan did not fight the noise. She had lost all sense of time and space, and the noise hid her and protected her. But, try as she might, her wall of white noise was not impenetrable. Slowly, the sound of the alarms found the cracks in her fortress walls and bore its way into her subconscious mind, gradually pulling her back to reality. Only dimly did she acknowledge the alarms ringing, but not as alarms, more like intruders into her sanctuary. She tried to push them away. When that did not work, she tried to move further into the veil of white noise, only to find that the sound of the alarms followed her. Little by little, the focus of her eyes shifted from infinity to the frame around the window in the cupola, and she noticed the rivets in the metal framework for the first time.
The klaxon still blared away as her conscious mind began to settle back into control, and she turned her head from the rivets to locate the source of the annoying sound. Looking around the cupola, her eyes were attracted by flashing symbols on the computer display. It took a few moments for her to focus on the display and to decipher its message. Moving closer to the console to get a better look, Susan haltingly read the words aloud to herself. “Alert…Status condition…pressure loss…pressure within nominal range…” The message flashed on and off. She stared at it for a minute or so before she realized that there was more writing, in smaller print, below it. “Press … to reset…status/alarms,” she whispered softly. At the end of the sentence was a small box with a flashing star in it. Susan stared at the star and then very cautiously, she reached over and touched the flashing symbol on the screen.
The klaxon went silent, and the screen she was watching disappeared and new information appeared. The relief she felt from shutting off the alarm was heavenly, and Susan closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Still in a daze and not really wanting to leave that state, she enjoyed the silence and began searching for her fortress of white noise again.
She was not to be so entitled, as a new sound, albeit softer, but just as annoying, pushed its way into her semiconscious mind. It dogged her relentlessly, not allowing her the refuge she sought in the subconscious fog. She slowly opened her eyes to search for the new culprit. This time, the noise was coming from the computer console she had just left, and it too was accompanied with flashing symbols on the display. Reluctantly, Susan moved closer to read the message: STANDBY COUNTDOWN ON HOLD. CONTINUE /ABORT?
Susan read the message to herself several times before she finally realized what the computer was trying to tell her. She vaguely remembered the countdown timer that Ivan had set before they left the control module. With that memory, she felt tightness in her throat and a chill shoot through her body: she shivered. With a trembling finger, she followed the words on the display, one by one, and when she reached the word—ABORT—she savagely stabbed the touch-sensitive screen and silenced the new alarm. Susan stared at the mute display until she was satisfied that there would be no more intrusions into her sanctuary. She then pushed herself away from the console and, shivering, pulled her knees up to her chest. Pressing her face into her knees, she sought darkness and quiet.
Inside the cabin of the CRV, the conscious crewmembers could hear a faint rumble as the craft quickly sliced into the thin atmosphere and the air molecules began to bombard the exterior of the ship. They also could begin to feel vibrations dance through the ship as it passed through layers of air with differing densities. Strapped into their seats, they were intimately in contact with the frame of the ship, and even though they had padding between them and the seat frame, they still could easily feel the vibrations.
Most of these vibrations were subtle and would have gone unnoticed by an average person on Earth. However, the crew felt every one of them, having been deprived of such sensations by floating in space for the last week, or the last few months in the case of the cosmonauts.
As the craft bore through the atmosphere, it began to decelerate but at a much greater rate than normal because of the modified reentry profile. This subjected the crew to g-forces much higher than normal, in excess of six times their weight on the ground, which was becoming extremely unbearable. The little ship also began a series of “S” turns, weaving back and forth, which were designed to bleed off more of its speed. This only multiplied the stress the crew was feeling every time the CRV changed direction.
Outside of the ship, the heat tiles were beginning to glow as they collided with the air molecules at more than seventeen thousand miles an hour. They would glow white-hot at temperatures over three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but would keep the crew compartment cool with the assistance of the environmental control system—in theory.
As they descended deeper into the atmosphere, the frictional heating overwhelmed the heat dissipation capabilities of the tiles, and the environmental control system was soon at its maximum capacity. The cabin was noticeably warmer, but the crew, having had no previous experience with reentry in the CRV, thought this to be normal.
The magnitude of the vibrations increased and the little ship began to rock and roll left to right, as it surfed into the ever-thickening atmosphere. Every now and then, they could hear a pop and feel a slight jolt as the computers fired the gas attitude control jets to keep the CRV in the proper orientation. The computer would use these nitrogen jets until the air density increased to where the mechanical control surfaces could be used, like a conventional airplane.
This amusement park ride through the atmosphere gradually became much more violent, and Paul was beginning to feel very nauseous from this new sensation and the heat. He kept his eyes closed, telling himself that it would be over shortly and tried to focus on seeing Celia when they landed. The last thing he wanted to do was lose his last meal while lying strapped on his back. He was having a difficult time with the high g-forces, but because he had only been in space for a little over a week his discomfort was nothing compared to that of Alexander and Nicholas. They had not felt such forces since their launch months earlier, and several times they came close to blacking out from the stress.
As Nicholas’ vision cleared from the last high-g turn, he noticed that the computer displayed a warning that the cabin temperature had exceeded the nominal range and showed a current temperature of one hundred and five degrees and rising. He debated about bringing it to the attention of the rest of the crew and finally decided that they knew, just as he did, that it was getting hotter inside the cabin. What frustrated him more was that he did not know what to do about it, if there was anything that could be done.
He tried to relax with the thought that the CRV was designed to be flown fully automated, so they must have taken this into account when they designed the craft. It was not much consolation at the moment. Nicholas checked the display with the camera view, but it showed nothing of interest other than a pinkish glow that flickered and filled the screen, a result of the charged air particles moving past the CRV. He tensed up as he could feel the ship moving into another turn.
Paul couldn’t take the heat any longer and shouted above the roar of the reentry to Nicholas. “I feel like I’m burning up! How hot is it in here?”
“We are at one hundred and fifteen degrees and it is still climbing!”
“Can’t you do anything about it?” Paul asked, before he realized that Nicholas knew as much about the CRV as he did.
“I am sorry, comrade. I think the little ship is doing all it can.”
“No, I’m sorry. I know you have no control over this. I just don’t know how much more I can take of this,” Paul said.
“It is mind over matter, Paul,” Alexander said. “Think about a nice Siberian winter.”
“Right now, I would give my right arm for a blast of Siberian air!” Paul shouted as he wiped the sweat from his eyes.
The crew would have been much more alarmed if they could see what was happening on the outside of their ship: tiles were beginning to fracture with the extreme temperatures and stresses they were experiencing. With each crack, pieces of the tiles would flake off, whittling down their original thickness and decreasing their ability to keep the heat from the internal skin of the CRV and, ultimately, from the sensitive control electronics and crew.
The speed of the CRV was decreasing, which would reduce the heating due to friction, but it was also diving deeper into the atmosphere: the air would be denser and the craft would experience more frictional heating. Eventually, they would reach a point where the speed of the CRV would be slow enough that the increase in air density would no longer increase the heat generated by friction. They had more than a few minutes to go before they reached that point, and the CRV had already lost enough tiles that hot spots were now beginning to form on its composite skin. It was just a matter of time before the forces of nature would determine when these hot spots burned through with catastrophic consequences.
Paul had his eyes closed and was trying to ignore the heat, noise and jostling that was making him more sick to his stomach by the minute. As he was trying to breathe slowly and regularly in an effort to control the nausea, his well-trained chemist’s nose detected a faint acrid scent, which brought him to full alert. “Can you smell that?” he asked, as he tried to raise his head and took another slow breath.
Nicholas and Alexander looked at Paul and sniffed the air. “I do not smell anything,” Nicholas offered first.
Alexander took a few breaths and said, “I do not smell anything. What do you smell?”
Paul exhaled, long and deep, emptying his lungs as best he could. He waited a few seconds and then slowly sampled the air with his nose, keeping his eyes closed to eliminate any unwanted sensory distractions. “I’m not sure, something smells like it’s burning, acrid, like plastic, or glue.” He repeated the breathing exercise. “Yes, it’s definitely plastic in origin. Do you smell it now? It’s getting stronger,” he said.
Alexander followed Paul’s example and exhaled deeply before testing the air. “Yes,
I can smell something, very faint…like burning plastic.”
“Me, too,” Nicholas said. “I am not surprised that something is getting hotter than it should, with the fact that we are running at a temperature that seems to be above what the ship considers normal. It may be in the electronics, it has that odor to it.” He looked at the control panel and displays for some indication of a problem, but saw nothing.
The display showed the cabin temperature at one hundred and twenty-one degrees. Nicholas reached up to the read-out to see if there was another status screen that might give him a hint as to what might be wrong. His hand barely touched the menu button on the display when it switched by itself and a piercing alarm sounded from the intercom! Nicholas pulled his arm back startled and turned to Paul and Alexander only to see them staring back as shocked as he was.
“What is that?” Paul shouted over the alarm.
“I did not do anything,” Nicholas confessed, “it did it on its own!”
“What’s the display showing?” Paul said, assuming that an audible alarm would have some visual indication on the display.
Nicholas turned around but did not have to look for a message on the display—it was there flashing in big letters: FIRE WARNING—ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL BAY!
“We have a fire!” Nicholas shouted. “Fire in the environmental control bay!”
“Oh, Christ!” Paul swore. He did not have the slightest idea what to do now and was feeling totally helpless. The thought of burning alive terrified him. Fighting to control his panic, he yelled, “Now what do we do? Where is the environmental control bay?”
