Fatal Orbit

by Tom Grace

“No!” Pete croaked, cutting her off. “Can’t tell Houston.”

  “But we must,” Molly countered.

  “Do as he asks for now,” Kelsey pleaded. “Let’s just concentrate on getting him aboard.”

  “Very well,” Molly acquiesced. “We’ll be ready for you at the airlock.”

  Kelsey picked a point in Pete’s line of travel and fired her SAFER.

  “Pete, I’m coming. Just hold on.”

  “I … air … gone …”

  “Hold on, Pete. I’m almost there.”

  Pete didn’t reply. Kelsey sped down from the array, hoping she hadn’t misjudged his rate of ascent. It took less than a minute to close the distance, and Pete was coming up fast. She fired the SAFER to stop, then reached out to grab his arm, but his spacesuit was too thick for her gloved hand to find purchase. Her attempt caused Pete to spin forward, his ascent unchanged.

  Desperate, Kelsey wrapped both her arms around Pete’s legs. She had him—upside down—but now they were both ascending and slowly rotating. She pulled her right hand back and used the SAFER to halt all their motion relative to the ISS.

  “Pete, can you hear me?”

  No answer.

  She carefully maneuvered Pete so he was facing her. Droplets of condensation clung to the inside of his visor. His eyes were closed, his lips parted and tinged with blue.

  “I have him,” Kelsey announced. “We’re coming in.”

  “Understood,” Molly replied.

  The two minutes it took to fly back to the station’s airlock and close the hatch seemed like an eon. The display on Pete’s suit reported a negligible amount of oxygen. Kelsey prayed it was enough to stave off death or permanent damage.

  Molly and Valentina watched through the observation window as air repressurized the chamber. Kelsey stripped off her gloves and moved quickly to remove Pete’s helmet. It detached from his spacesuit with a sucking hiss. Pete’s face had turned ashen gray.

  “Breathe, Pete, breathe,” Kelsey implored, lightly slapping his cheeks.

  The change came slowly at first, and then Pete’s skin grew noticeably warmer in color. He coughed and gasped, like a drowned man revived. Kelsey braced her feet and held him so he wouldn’t tumble into a bulkhead. He continued to shake, his chest wracked with spasms, his eyes wide and glassy.

  “It’s all right, Pete. You made it. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but you made it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As soon as the airlock equalized with the station, Molly and Valentina opened the hatch. Kelsey, still in her EMU, cradled Pete in her arms. The unconscious spacewalker’s head dripped with sweat and condensation. Valentina quickly detached Pete’s spent PLSS, then pulled him through into Node 1 where she and Molly had more room to remove the rest of his spacesuit. The two women worked quickly, then Valentina, the expedition’s medical officer, began tending to her patient.

  Kelsey had her helmet off by the time Molly floated through the hatch to assist her.

  “Bloody miraculous,” Molly said as she removed the PLSS from Kelsey’s back.

  Kelsey fumbled with her space suit, her hands quivering. “I’m still shaking. When I heard his voice, it was like …” Her voice faltered, unable to capture the words to describe her emotions.

  “Let’s get the rest of that off you,” Molly said sympathetically.

  Though officially listed as a one-person job, donning or doffing the EMU was actually quite difficult without a second pair of hands. Once Kelsey was out of her suit, the two women glided into Node 1.

  “How is he?” Kelsey asked.

  “Unconscious, but stable,” Valentina replied. “His airway is clear and he doesn’t appear to have suffered any physical injuries.”

  “Prognosis?” Molly inquired.

  Valentina shrugged. “It depends on how long he was deprived of oxygen.”

  “He was unconscious when I reached him,” Kelsey said, “but we spoke just a moment before. It couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes before I had him in the airlock.”

  “Hypoxia is a very tricky condition. If we got to him soon enough, he’ll recover fully. Otherwise, there could be complications. For now, I think we should move him to the Hab and make him comfortable.”

  “Then we should contact Mission Control,” Molly said.

  “Pete said we shouldn’t.”

  “That could be the hypoxia,” Valentina offered. “It creates a state much like drunkenness.”

  “He sounded pretty emphatic about it,” Kelsey countered, “and I think we should wait until he comes around to find out why.”

  Molly considered this, then turned to Valentina. “Do you need to consult with Surgeon?”

  “Nyet. There’s nothing else to be done.”

  “Molly, as far as Mission Control knows, Pete died with everyone else on Liberty. Waiting a little while before contacting them won’t hurt anything.”

  “What about his family?”

  “For the moment, I think his wishes override every other concern.”

  “Very well, then,” Molly decided. “We’ll wait till Pete comes around.”

  Pete lay in a sleeping bag, fastened to the wall of the Habitation Module. Nearby, Kelsey floated, reading an e-book while watching over him. From their first meeting, Kelsey had thought of the stocky Hoosier as a physically imposing man. It amazed her now to see how much of that perceived strength the ordeal in space had robbed him of.

  “God, my neck hurts,” Pete rasped, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Easy, Pete,” Kelsey said softly. “Do you want some water?”

  Pete nodded. Kelsey lifted a squeeze bottle up to his mouth.

  “Take it slow.”

  Pete gagged on his first attempt to swallow. A few errant droplets escaped from the corner of his mouth. Kelsey blotted at them with a cloth before they floated away. She then switched on the station intercom.

  “Val, Molly, He’s awake.”

  “I was in space, running out of air,” Pete recalled, trying to piece events together. “How did I—”

  “Shhh. I was outside when you arrived. I pulled you in.”

  “Liberty. Everyone’s dead.”

  “We know,” Kelsey said softly. “Mission Control told us shortly after it happened. A terrible accident.”

  Pete shook his head. “Deliberate.”

  Kelsey’s face blanched. Just then, Valentina and Molly entered the module from Node 1, the Russian gliding straight to the end of the module to examine her patient. Kelsey moved to the middle of the module where Molly waited.

  “Molly,” Kelsey said in a low voice, “Pete just told me something very disturbing.”

  “What?”

  “He said whatever happened to Liberty was deliberate.”

  “Are you serious? How could that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where you are?” Valentina asked as she fastened a pressure cuff to Pete’s arm.

  “Space station,” Pete replied hoarsely.

  “What day is it?

  “Mission elapsed time—day ten, maybe eleven. How long was I out?”

  “About four hours,” Valentina answered with a trace of a smile—her patient had demonstrated both memory and cognitive function. “I’ll get you something for the pain and you should continue to rest for a while. I think you’ll be fully recovered in a few days.”

  Overhearing Valentina’s prognosis, Kelsey and Molly moved to the end of the module.

  “Is your patient ready for a few questions?” Molly asked.

  “Da. I think we got to him before there was any lasting damage.”

  “Pete, what happened?” Kelsey asked.

  “Satellite—the one we launched before docking here. It didn’t make orbit. We went to retrieve it, bring it back for repairs. Caroline was in the bay. I was out on the end of the arm to make the grab. We got it, and while Tosh was pulling it in, I found out why it didn’t make orbit. Cryo tank blew. Strange, too.”<
br />
  “How so?” Molly asked.

  “The tank blew out on opposite sides, I could look right through it. And the holes, not that big and perfectly round. Like something shot right through it.”

  “What about Liberty?” Kelsey asked.

  “It’s while I was checking out the satellite that something happened in the crew compartment—I don’t know what, but I could hear the alarms going off over my headset. The hull was breached—I saw two plumes shooting out the flight-deck roof. She was bleeding atmosphere fast. A second later, I got knocked off the satellite and went tumbling into space. By the time I recovered from the spin, Liberty’s whole tail section was gone and she was heading straight down.”

  “What makes you suspect this was deliberate?” Molly asked. “Couldn’t Liberty simply have been hit by something in orbit?”

  Pete shook his head. “Once, maybe, but not three times. And whatever hit her went in one side and out the other. A piece of space junk couldn’t do that.”

  “He’s right,” Kelsey said. “Even at orbital velocity, a projectile crashing through one side of Liberty would’ve lost a lot of its kinetic energy, assuming it even survived the initial impact in one piece.”

  “Like gunshot to the head,” Valentina concurred. “The bullet gets flattened against the skull before it punches through. Once inside, it doesn’t have enough energy left to exit other side, so it just rattles around in the brain.”

  “That is a truly revolting image,” Molly declared.

  “Unfortunately, it is one I saw many times in emergency room.”

  “Disgusting or not, it illustrates my point,” Kelsey continued. “A solid projectile would lose a lot of its energy to deformation and fragmentation. The initial impact would have been devastating, but there shouldn’t be enough residual velocity for it to continue straight through the flight-deck floor and out the other side. Only a focused beam of high-energy laser could do that.”

  “Are you suggesting that an energy weapon has been placed in orbit?” Molly asked.

  “That’s one possibility. I’ve seen proposals for ground- and air-based lasers as well, though none that are beyond rudimentary testing.”

  “I think we’re making some very large leaps here,” Molly said, “and with only one person’s word to go on. Begging your pardon, Pete, but there could be a multitude of explanations to account for what you saw, or thought you saw, before the explosion.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “Perhaps, and perhaps not. I think it best we contact Houston and give them at least one piece of good news today.”

  “No,” Pete said emphatically. “Liberty and that satellite were destroyed for a reason.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “I don’t know, but if I saw something I wasn’t supposed to, letting the outside world know I’m here could be dangerous.”

  “Pete,” Molly said, her tone softer, “I don’t mean to sound like I’m belittling your powers of observation, but based on what you’ve told us, you didn’t have time to take anything more than a cursory glance at the satellite. And what you saw of Liberty was fleeting at best.”

  Pete thought for a moment. “What about my helmet camera? It should have a record of everything I saw.”

  “But then Mission Control should’ve seen it as well,” Molly countered. “And we’ve received no warning from them about a space weapon.”

  “Houston didn’t see any of the EVA. Liberty’s CCTV and part of the comm system went out while Caroline and I were getting prepped,” Pete explained.

  “We have to take a look at that video before making any decision about contacting Houston,” Kelsey advised.

  “Do it,” Molly agreed.

  Kelsey shot up to Node 1, then turned ninety degrees and pulled herself into the airlock. Both spacesuits were stowed in racks against the wall. She retrieved Pete’s helmet, still fitted with work lights and a digital video camera, and removed the unit’s flash memory card.

  “Got it,” Kelsey announced on her return.

  She slipped the card into one of the wall mounted computer stations. The screen flickered, then a still image of the ISS taken from a distance appeared. In it, Kelsey saw herself en route to Pete. The others hovered around her, watching the monitor.

  “Did you leave your camera on the whole time you were out there?”

  “I must’ve,” Pete admitted. “After all that happened, I guess I forgot to turn it off.”

  Kelsey checked the card’s statistics. “Pete, there’s over nine hours of video here. You’ve got a full record of what has to be one of the greatest survival epics in history.”

  “Trust me, most of it is pretty boring,” Pete replied. “What you want to see is in the first hour.”

  Kelsey reset the time index to 00:00 and fast-forwarded through the video in time-lapse stills.

  “Start there,” Pete said.

  The still image showed the charred foil covering the side of the satellite. Moving at normal speed, they peered with Pete into the blasted propulsion unit.

  “Hold it there,” Pete said. “That’s what I was telling you about.”

  The still image showed the aluminum skin of a fuel tank splayed open like the withered petals of a scorched metal flower. The work lights on Pete’s helmet shone down into the empty hold of the tank, and on the opposite side was a similar forced opening.

  “That’s odd,” Kelsey said. “Take a look at the ends of these shards.”

  She zoomed in tightly on the ends of scorched flower petals, panning them slowly, one by one. The sides of each petal were jagged—indicative of the blast that had violently torn the metal—but the tips all ended in smooth, concave arcs.

  “If you bend them back into place—” Valentina mused.

  “—they would form a circle,” Molly concurred.

  “More precisely, an ellipse,” Kelsey said. “A perfectly elliptical hole.”

  “That ain’t no manufacturing defect,” Pete said, relieved the evidence bore him out.

  “A metal-to-metal collision wouldn’t make a nice clean hole like that,” Kelsey said, “but a laser would.”

  “Let’s see the rest of it,” Molly ordered.

  The destruction of Liberty unfolded exactly as Pete had described it. The three women watched in horror as the wounded orbiter plunged downward, knowing they’d just watched the death of six fellow astronauts.

  Pete looked away, having relived the moment too many times already.

  When Liberty disappeared from view, Kelsey turned off the replay. “I think Pete’s interpretation of these events is valid. Those holes in Liberty were definitely not caused by micrometeorites or space junk.”

  “I’m convinced,” Molly said, “but we still must tell someone what we know. Mission Control has to see this video.”

  Pete shook his head. “You saw what happened to Liberty, Molly. God knows who’s behind this, but if word got out about me and that video—”

  The threat hanging over all their heads was unimaginable.

  “We’ve got to get this information into the right hands,” Kelsey said, “without broadcasting it to the world and painting a big bull’s-eye on the station. I think I know how to do it.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PEARL HARBOR

  After a dozen hours of near-comatose sleep, Kilkenny arose just before dawn and set out from the hotel on a ten-mile run. A steady breeze off the ocean cooled him as he ran, shaking off the previous days of confinement aboard Virginia. By the time he looped back to the hotel, the sun was cresting over the Koolau Range and the temperature was starting to rise.

  When he reached his room, he found the message light on his phone blinking—it was from Grin. He returned the call.

  “Great, you’re back,” Grin said, relieved. “Have you seen the news?”

  “Nope.” Kilkenny sat on the edge of the bed and removed his Nikes. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know the details, just turn on
your TV.”

  Grin was the kind of guy who took most of what he saw or heard in the news with a certain jaded cynicism—especially politics. The last time Kilkenny heard this tone in his friend’s voice was on September 11. He grabbed the remote and switched on Fox. They were cycling to the top of the news rotation. Lead story: Space Shuttle Liberty Destroyed. Kilkenny’s heart sank.

  “Good Lord.”

  “Yeah,” Grin said, echoing his friend’s concern.

  Kilkenny turned up the volume and carefully listened to the report. The space beat reporter in Houston quickly ran down the facts as they were known, summarizing what had been a very successful mission up until the disaster that claimed the lives of all seven people aboard. France and Russia joined the United States in mourning the lost men and women of Liberty.

  “You okay?” Grin asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just for a second there—“

  “I know. I thought the same thing. Can you get word to her?”

  “I don’t know. NASA’s probably swamped right now.”

  “Tell you what. Meet me downstairs. We’ll grab a quick bite and head over to the lab for a little Grin-at-sleight-of-hand-dot-com.”

  “You’re going to hack NASA?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  Kilkenny and Grin entered their makeshift computer lab, a small office in one of the recently renovated office buildings on the naval base. As their computers booted up, Grin switched on his iPod. The plaintive opening chords of the Chieftains album Tears of Stone wailed from the tiny speakers.

  Nine days of e-mail awaited Kilkenny when he launched his computer—some of it junk, most of it work-related or personal. Skimming through the listings, one immediately stuck out.

  “She beat us to it.”

  “Who?” Grin asked.

  “Kelsey. She sent an e-mail. It’s dated just a few hours ago.”

  Grin rolled his chair over to Kilkenny’s desk. “Well, open it.”

  Kilkenny selected the message. A warning appeared on his screen that the message was encrypted.

  “NASA lets her do that?”

  “Sure, and we both have security clearances. It’s only for personal communication.”