by Tom Grace
The vertical tail was the largest fragment to emerge from the fireball engulfing Liberty’s aft fuselage. Pete couldn’t hear the twin explosions—the near vacuum of space erasing any sound—but the tail’s impact on the far side of Oculus was impossible to miss.
Liberty’s tail crushed the lightly built satellite, wrapping the spacecraft around its leading edge, locking the two together. Even though his chest was protected by his spacesuit’s rigid upper torso, Pete felt like he’d been struck squarely by a three-hundred-pound linebacker. The blow loosened his grip on the satellite’s frame and flung him spinning into space.
The RMS held fast to the satellite through the impact and pulled the entire tangled mass at its end in a sweeping arc that ended with a collision that shattered Liberty’s port wing.
Pete quickly reached around his left to the base of his PLSS, grabbed the control module for his SAFER unit, and brought it around front. The module consisted of a joystick and a display. Manipulating the joystick, he fired a short series of nitrogen bursts from the SAFER and brought himself to a stop. He then surveyed the extent of the damage done to the orbiter.
Liberty was slowly rolling end over end, the last wisps of air sputtering from four distinct holes. The crew cabin was now as cold and inhospitable as space. In the payload bay, Caroline lay grotesquely entangled in the struts supporting the docking airlock, her body broken and still. Looking aft, he saw wreckage in place of the orbiter’s propulsion systems.
She’s falling, Pete realized as the damaged spacecraft passed beneath him.
The explosion had acted like a full burn from the main engines, robbing Liberty of her precious speed and pushing her down toward the Earth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“INCO, anything?” Jesup yelled.
“Negative,” the communications officer replied. “We’re not receiving any signals from Liberty. We’ve lost contact.”
Pacing, Jesup slammed his clipboard against his console. The rendezvous with the errant satellite had been textbook perfect. Then, as the crew was reeling the captured bird in, all hell had broken loose aboard Liberty.
“Eecom, what happened up there?”
“The data I have indicate a sudden loss of cabin pressure at 19:22:47,” the emergency, environmental and consumables manager replied. The woman continued scanning the information on her screen as she spoke. “I’m not seeing any problems with the systems, even after the pressure drop. It might be an impact.”
“Shit!”
“Flight, the media wants to know what’s happening,” the public affairs officer reported.
“Shit!” Jesup wheeled around to the PAO. “Tell ’em we’re having trouble communicating with Liberty, but nothing else until we know more ourselves.”
The PAO nodded and relayed the current mission status to the reporters in the press room.
“Security, clear the observation gallery,” Jesup ordered.
“Flight? I think I got something,” EGIL called out.
“Yeah, Eagle?”
“Just before we lost contact, there was a temperature spike in the LOX tank.”
“How big a spike?” Jesup asked, leaning over the man’s console.
Temperature sensors mounted on the tank containing the Liberty’s supply of liquid oxygen recorded a sudden change from minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly zero just before the data feed was lost. At the last recorded temperature, the cryogenically chilled fuel would have instantly boiled into a gas. The pressure exerted by the rapidly expanding gas inside the tank would have been explosive.
“Big enough,” EGIL replied.
“Any malfunctions in the cryo system?”
“Negative. The spike is the only sign of a problem.”
Jesup checked the time index on the data feed. Liberty’s main computers had continued transmitting several seconds after the temperature spike, reporting null data from the propulsion systems. The time index for the spike read 19:22:52.
“Eecom, say again when Liberty lost pressure.”
She reread the time index from her screen. Jesup rechecked the index on Prop’s screen.
“The crew compartment lost pressure before the tank heated up,” Jesup mused aloud. “Damn.”
He looked at the control room’s main screen. Liberty’s projected path put her over the Pacific on a line headed toward Northern California. He returned to his post and hit his phone’s speed dial for U.S. Space Command.
“INCO, anything at all from Liberty?” he shouted as the line rang.
“Negative. She’s gone quiet.”
Tim Heshel answered Jesup’s call before the second ring. “Fred, I do not like what I’m seeing right now.”
“Do you have a track on Liberty?” Jesup asked somberly.
“Yeah. I hate to say this, but she’s coming down awful fast.”
“Where?”
“Best guess? Draw a line across the middle of the U.S. Whatever survives reentry will land within a hundred miles on either side. What happened?”
“We’re still trying to figure it out. Everything was going great, then wham. Preliminary indications look like she took a hit.”
“No way. You and I went through this when we cleared the window.”
“I know, but just the same you better recheck your logs and lock down your data. It’s going to be Columbia all over again.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Liberty plunged into the atmosphere above the Sierra Nevada Mountains, inverted and breech. The wreckage of the vertical fin and the captured satellite tore away first, ripping the robotic arm from its track, followed quickly by the payload bay doors. Caroline’s body disappeared in an instant, consumed by the hellish fire of reentry. And soon after, Liberty shattered into pieces. The crew compartment sheared away, taking with it the external airlock assembly. Friction and heat then tore these components apart, exposing the interior of the crew compartment. Everything combustible inside was incinerated.
The fireball was clearly visible in the blue sky over Tennessee. Boaters and swimmers in Lake Cumberland stopped to view the unexpected celestial display. Then wonder turned to horror with the still-fresh memory of another funeral pyre that too recently had burned across the Texas sky.
Pete was somewhere over Colorado when he finally lost sight of Liberty’s fiery descent. Tears streamed down his face as he prayed for the souls of his lost crewmates, but he allowed himself only a moment’s grief.
After regaining control with the SAFER, he made a check of his EMU. He found no leaks in the spacesuit and his PLSS also appeared undamaged. The satellite he’d clung to had saved his life, but the question was for how long. Pete was currently the fastest human alive, but eventually friction would rob him of his speed and, like Icarus, he would fall from the heavens. His only consolation was that he’d be dead long before his body burned in the fire of reentry.
A veteran spacewalker, Pete knew his EMU systems better than the people who engineered them. His most critical problem was consumables—the twin tanks in his PLSS contained enough oxygen to last him possibly nine hours. After that, he would suffocate and die.
“Well, Pete, what are you going to do?” he asked himself. “You gonna just float there like a wuss and wait for the end or are you going to go down swinging?”
With a quick burst from the SAFER, he reoriented himself to face in the direction he was traveling. In the distance, he saw the unmistakable shimmering of the largest object in orbit and his only hope of survival: the ISS.
The space station’s altitude was roughly forty miles higher than his and both were circling the globe in the same direction. Pete knew it was possible to get ahead of the ISS while in a lower orbit, then boost himself into position for a rendezvous, as the shuttle did. The deadly variable in his survival plan was time.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
News stations around the globe were all replaying the same snippets of amateur video, the
same awful image of fireballs streaking across a cloudless sky, the remains of an object disintegrating in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Then came the carefully worded statements from the Public Affairs Office at the Johnson Space Center, a terse confirmation that during the retrieval of a commercial satellite contact with Liberty had been lost.
Skye turned away from the monitors and gazed out her office windows at the pier where Aequatus and Argo were moored. Both vessels were marvels of modern engineering and as technologically advanced as almost anything afloat.
The glistening white Aequatus was slightly wider than a football field and twice as long. Beneath her main deck, a cavernous hold ran the full length and breadth of the ship. Up to three Skye-4GR rockets could be assembled and fitted with payloads and prepared for launch in the hold, though at present only one lay inside the world’s only floating rocket assembly facility. The ship’s five-story superstructure could accommodate 240 crew, technicians, and guests and housed the mission control facilities for launches at sea—the purpose for which this unique ship had been designed and built.
In its first incarnation, Argo had searched for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the largest self-propelled, semi-submersible vessels in the world and could accommodate sixty-eight crew and technical personnel. Eight massive columns supported the white and gray launch platform, which was two-thirds as long as Aequatus and twice as wide. The black columns, in turn, were borne by a pair of black pontoons, each as large as a Seawolf Class submarine. An elongated hangar jutted out from atop the platform like a large head, giving the lumbering craft the look of a mechanical eight-legged sea monster.
Skye ran through the checklist in her mind. Over the next few days, technicians would run a full diagnostic on the rocket and its payload. Once the rocket was fully prepared for flight, the stern doors of Aequatus would be opened and the two-hundred-foot-long launch vehicle would be rolled out on rails and onto Argo’s transfer hoist. The huge lifting mechanism would then climb back into place with the rocket, forming the floor of the launch platform’s climate-controller hangar.
“It had to be done,” Moug offered reassuringly.
“That knowledge doesn’t make my actions any more palatable,” Skye replied. “But this is the course I’ve chosen, and I will see it through.”
“Your defensive strategy was sound.”
“This isn’t a game to me, Owen. This company is my life. I’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.”
Moug nodded. “The debris field extends well off the East Coast, making most, if not all, of Liberty unrecoverable. Also, any immediate search effort will have to deal with a tropical storm moving north from the Bahamas.”
“It won’t stop them from looking. The Chinese navy hasn’t given up trying to find the remains of Shenzhou-7.”
“I’m not worried about what NASA or the Chinese might find, there’s not enough left of either spacecraft to piece together what really happened.”
“It will remain a mystery for conspiracy theorists,” Skye said. “I wonder what they’ll say.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA
“Sir,” Alana Taggert called out, “I’m tracking something you might want to take a look at.”
“I’ll be right there, Lieutenant,” Heshel replied.
He cradled the phone and left his windowless office with a cup of old coffee. Right now he needed a decent jolt of caffeine and hoped that someone had a fresh pot on in the Tracking Center.
The explosion that destroyed Liberty had doubled Heshel’s normal duty shift as he and his staff searched for anything in orbit that might have brought the spacecraft down. While most of the orbiter had burned up during reentry, hundreds of fragments, ranging in size from a few inches to several feet, were still circled the globe. Space Command had to tag each and analyze its orbit.
“What do you got?” Heshel asked.
“A fragment from Liberty is closing on the ISS.”
“How big?”
“About seven feet long.”
Heshel studied the enlarged image on Taggert’s monitor. The two track lines were on a southeast course, heading toward the African coast.
“Altitude?”
“One-eighty-seven.”
“That puts this thing about thirty-three miles under the ISS.”
“Its altitude is increasing.”
“Increasing?”
Taggert nodded. “Probably picked up some positive-Z from the explosion. That’s what I wanted you to see. The two tracks are coincident at the moment, but the fragment will pull ahead in another couple orbits.”
“Then there’s no cause for alarm.”
“True, but after what happened today—”
“I understand. Anything else that might cause ISS a problem?”
“No, the rest of her track is clear.”
“Fine. Let’s call it a night. I’ll see you back here at oh-eight-hundred.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN ORBIT
Passing over the west coast of Africa, Pete was well into his second solo orbit of the Earth. At most, he had seven hours of oxygen left. He looked up and saw in the distance the bright sunlit glow of the ISS, at the moment the most welcome object in his personal cosmos. It was nearly above him. Catching up with the station by riding the lower orbit had turned out to be easier than he’d expected. Then he remembered Lundy’s golf analogy for orbital rendezvous: Drive for show, putt for dough.
Getting to this point was like a solid drive off the tee that had left him with a good lie on the fairway. More a matter of brute force than surgical precision. To putt for dough, Pete had to close the distance. During his first lap around the planet, he had managed to gain about six miles of altitude.
“Thirty-five miles. No wind,” Pete mused as he gazed at the ISS. “I think I’ll use a seven iron, see if I can put it on the green.”
He flicked his wrist and fired the SAFER. Tiny jets of nitrogen gas erupted from the nozzles on his backpack, pushing him on an upward angle at the pace of a slow run.
Kelsey floated inside Zwicky-Wolff making careful adjustments to one of the array’s constellation of detectors. The delicate work seemed an exercise in frustration due to the thick inflated gloves that surrounded her hands. But she was thankful for the work as it kept her mind off the tragedy that had struck Liberty. People she’d spent a year training with were now dead.
As she labored, her thoughts drifted back to another array—this one in a salt mine deep under Lake Erie. Over a year ago, she had conscripted Nolan to help her upgrade the several thousand photomultiplier tubes that lined the walls of a six-story-deep cube of water. The job required several hours’ dive time and the tedium of the work was only broken by Nolan’s playful nature. Even when they were growing up together, he had possessed a Zenlike ability to find satisfaction in whatever he was doing.
Kelsey finished the adjustment and closed the housing on the detector. Looking at the Earth, she caught sight of the Hawaiian Islands and thought of him. As hard as she’d worked to realize this lifelong dream, a part of her already looked forward to returning home and resuming the rest of her life.
“C’mon, baby,” Pete urged. “Just a little closer.”
His body ached, stiff from over eight hours of inactivity. He had had to limit his movements during his orbital trek because of Newton’s First Law of Motion. Unrestrained in microgravity, any movement of his arms or legs might put him into a spin, and to halt the spin he would have to waste some of the SAFER’s precious nitrogen propellant, all of which he needed to pull this rendezvous off. Pete knew his attempt to reach the ISS was a long shot of lottery-esque proportions, but he did all he could to keep his odds from deteriorating any further.
What had started out like a shining point of light in the distance had, in five orbits, grown larger and more substantial. Distinct elements of the station were now clearly visible. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
&n
bsp; Pete took a sip of water—his mouth parched from breathing bottled air—and began plotting his next move. Only a few short bursts remained in the SAFER, leaving him with only one real chance for success.
The ISS was, he guessed, less than a quarter-mile above him. At this moment, he would have given his right arm for a laser range finder and access to Liberty’s computer. He drew an imaginary line down the main axis of the station, then extended it another hundred feet in its forward line of travel. When he found his mark, he twisted the joystick and squeezed another burst of thrust from the SAFER.
“ … o yo … py? O … r.”
The crackle of static and broken syllables startled Kelsey. Other than her regular radio checks, all she’d heard in the last two hours was the sound of her own breathing. She stopped work, straining to listen.
“ISS … c … py? … ver.” The signal sounded stronger, but the voice was just above a whisper.
“This is ISS. Over.”
“Tha … k God. Kels … y, is … at you?”
Kelsey paled. The voice she heard belonged to a dead man. “Pete?”
“Kelsey,” Molly’s voice blurted in. “Who are you talking to out there?”
“She’s talk … g to me,” Pete answered weakly.
“Pete!” Kelsey said excitedly, her voice a near shout. “Where are you?”
“Hundred feet,” he gasped, “ … front of station.”
Kelsey turned around and saw a tiny figure rising up in space ahead of the ISS.
“Low on air,” Pete continued. “SAFER gone.”
Kelsey tethered her tools and grabbed the control module for her SAFER. “I’m going after him, Molly. Meet me at the airlock with a med kit.”
“I’ll contact Mission Control—”
