Fatal Orbit

by Tom Grace

  “I remember that,” Kilkenny said. “The comet had broken up into pieces during a previous pass of the planet.”

  “Yeah, then they came down, one after another. Bing, bang, boom. The three pieces we spotted so far are pretty much in a nice straight line, right down the alley. Got me thinking, maybe we caught a break. We’ll continue running wide lanes, see if we find the rest. Then we’ll do a tight pass, get better resolution over the whole site.”

  “How long will all that take?” Tao asked.

  “We ought to be done early tomorrow afternoon.”

  “How deep is the wreckage?”

  Peretti cast a wary eye over the Hardsuit. “Let’s just say I hope they figured in a safety margin on your depth rating.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Kilkenny asked.

  “Weather’s turning to shit on us. Storm front’s coming through, nothing terrible, but the sea’ll be heavy enough to keep me from pitching you over the side on the end of the crane. Chances are good you won’t be diving at all tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  AUGUST 18

  Kilkenny returned to the stern deck near dawn. A heavy layer of gray clouds blanketed the sky, but the seas were calm and the midwinter storm had petered to an intermittent drizzle. Peretti stood by the stern, watching a couple of crewmen service the ship’s crane.

  “Not a pretty morning, but the sea’s decent enough to dive,” Peretti said by way of a greeting.

  “You found the other three pieces?”

  Peretti nodded. “Little farther out than we expected, but pretty much in line with the first three. You wanna take a look?”

  Kilkenny nodded and followed Peretti down to the electronics suite. Tao was already there, seated beside the sonar operator in front of a high-resolution plasma screen. Kilkenny stood behind her. On the screen he saw a long, roughly cylindrical shape partially embedded in the ocean floor. Using a mouse, the operator was taking critical measurements of the object.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “It’s either the Core Module or Kvant-2,” the operator speculated. “Both are about the same size,”

  Kilkenny looked closely at the ghostly image. “Looks like an old beer can from here. How far apart are the pieces?”

  “About a mile from first to last.” The operator switched to a wider image of the ocean floor. The bottom looked smooth, interrupted only by six mounds in a roughly straight line running southwest to northeast.

  “What are the currents like down there?”

  “Two to three knots, perpendicular to the line of the wreck.”

  “How do you want to tackle this?” Peretti asked.

  “Start with this one,” Kilkenny replied, pointing to the last fragment found, “and work my way back.”

  “When do you want to dive?”

  “As soon as I can get in the water.”

  After a light breakfast, Kilkenny and Tao worked with the crew of the Sea Lion on deployment and retrieval procedures and shipboard dive operations. Fortunately, the ship’s dive master, Joan Frores, had had experience with earlier models of the ADS while servicing oil rigs in the North Sea.

  Kilkenny met Frores on the stern deck. Kilkenny had changed into a fleece sweatsuit for warmth, covered with an outer layer of Gore-Tex. A small flashlight hung from a cord around his neck and his head was covered by a lightweight stocking cap. Around his waist he wore a belly pack filled with snacks and emergency supplies. He slipped on a pair of clear, bug-eye glasses, similar to the ones worn by athletes. Thin rubber-coated cables ran from the end of each ear stem, joining behind his head into a single wire terminated with a USB connector.

  “I have to say, I’m a bit squeamish about you diving without an umbilical,” Frores opined. “I always liked knowing I had a firm grip on the lads when they were in deep water.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Kilkenny reassured her. “The wireless digital in the suit is just as good as an umbilical and the fuel cell will provide all the power I’ll need. Besides, where would I have put a spool with a mile of cable on it, in my carry-on bag?”

  Frores laughed. “Not likely. Well, let’s get you buttoned up.”

  Using a hand crank, Kilkenny hoisted the Hardsuit’s upper torso up off the lower torso/leg assembly. Out of the water, the empty cast-aluminum suit weighed fifteen hundred pounds.

  When the upper torso was clear, he climbed up the back of the support frame and eased himself into the lower half. That portion of the suit came up to his sternum.

  “Oh no, Gromit!” Kilkenny exclaimed, recoiling in mock horror. “It’s the wrong trousers!”

  Frores stared, the reference completely lost on her.

  “Wallace and Gromit?” he hinted.

  Frores shook her head.

  “It was an Academy Award-winning short,” Kilkenny said, exasperated. “A claymation classic.”

  “Sorry, I’m not much for the cinema. Here’s your scrubber.”

  “Bet she doesn’t even like cheese,” Kilkenny muttered to himself as he accepted the cartridge, again imitating Nick Park’s hapless inventor.

  Kilkenny fit the scrubber cartridge, which was filled with a granular CO2 adsorbent, into place in the rear of the suit’s waist. Unlike conventional scuba, in which the diver’s exhaled breath is discharged from the regulator mouthpiece in a stream of bubbles—an open-circuit design—the HS5000 used a closed-circuit design. As Kilkenny breathed inside the suit, the CO2 from his respiration would be scrubbed from the air by the adsorbent. Without the scrubber, Kilkenny would quickly suffocate.

  “All set,” Kilkenny reported.

  “Tuck your wings in.”

  Kilkenny folded his arms over his chest and, as Frores lowered the upper torso, wriggled through the opening. The upper torso mated perfectly, setting down onto the oil-filled hydraulic joint. Kilkenny set the interior latches, then turned the upper torso—it rotated freely without a sound.

  “Ready for the dome,” Kilkenny said.

  Frores climbed up the front of the support armature carrying the thick acrylic dome that would cover Kilkenny’s head. She set it into place, then drove in three bolts at equidistant points around the dome’s circular base. Inside the suit, Kilkenny hung an emergency mask around his neck and plugged his headset and goggles into jacks near the base of the dome.

  “Radio check, test.”

  “Loud and clear, Nolan,” Tao replied from the sonar room.

  After Kilkenny set up the oxygen system, Frores attached a vacuum pump to the back of the suit and dropped the internal pressure one-half PSI below that of the outside. She watched the gauge carefully for several minutes, but the digital counter never wavered. The seals on the suit were all good.

  Chin on his chest, Kilkenny studied the suit’s familiar layout of controls and displays. System by system, Kilkenny powered up the suit. From the console, he tested his camera, external lighting, trim adjusters, and a portable version of the experimental acoustic daylighting system. Inside the boots, Kilkenny’s feet rested on actuated plates that controlled four thrusters mounted on the suit’s backpack. Vertical controls were housed in the left foot, lateral controls in the right.

  Kilkenny pushed his hands down into the articulated arms. In the end of each arm, he grabbed hold of a contoured handgrip. Flexing his wrist, he rotated the manipulator assembly through twenty degrees of movement. He squeezed on the grips, testing the operation of the manipulator jaws.

  “All systems are good,” Kilkenny announced.

  Frores flashed him an okay sign, then waved over several other crewmen to roll the support stand bearing the Hardsuit into position near the crane. Kilkenny braced himself inside the suit as he was moved across the deck. They set him near the stern rail, facing out toward the sea.

  Looking up, he watched Frores connect the crane cable to the lift attachment. She slipped the quick-release fastener down over the bullet-shaped casting and it locked in place. Then she motioned to the crane operator to gradually ta
ke up the slack, and the cable went taut. With the weight of the suit supported by the crane, Frores swung open the support stand, leaving Kilkenny standing free.

  Frores looked one last time through the dome.

  “Ready?” she shouted.

  Kilkenny signed okay.

  Slowly, the crane lifted Kilkenny off the deck and out over the rail. They let him down easy—the surest sign of a skilled deck crew. Two divers were already in the cold sea, waiting for him. A red flag with a diagonal white stripe fluttered from the ship’s mast. Diver Down.

  When the water was chest-high, Frores stopped his descent. The suit bobbed in the light sea, weighing only seven pounds in the water. With a little slack in the cable, Kilkenny pivoted his left foot, firing the thrusters for descent. He slipped beneath the surface and was enveloped by blue-green water.

  Kilkenny descended to ten feet, then waited.

  Ka-chink.

  The cable released and was quickly pulled up to keep it from drifting back into the Hardsuit.

  “You’re all clear,” Tao reported over his headset. “Good hunting.”

  “Roger that,” Kilkenny replied, and he began a controlled descent to the ocean floor.

  He folded his arms over his chest to stay warm. After he passed through the surface layer, the water temperature around him rapidly dropped and was now near freezing. Other than the pale glow from his displays, Kilkenny was enveloped in complete darkness. He kept the external lights off to conserve power and busied himself with regular checks of the onboard systems.

  “Approaching forty-five hundred feet,” he called out.

  “We copy that, Nolan,” Tao replied.

  “Switching on AD.”

  His goggles flickered, then filled with the image of the sea as if the water were transparent for miles. Schools of fish swam as if in midair. Looking up, he saw the Sea Lion’s keel, a dark tiny shape in a hazy field of acoustic scatter.

  “Sea Lion, the view is tremendous.”

  “We see it,” Tao replied, amazed. “Your video is coming through clearly.”

  With a slight adjustment of his foot pedals, Kilkenny tilted the suit forward slightly to get a better view of the approaching bottom. He felt an uneasy sense of vertigo, the computer-generated visual from the AD system showing nothing between him and gray field of rocks and silt below.

  It’s all mind over matter, he reminded himself. If I don’t mind, it don’t matter.

  One hundred feet above the ocean floor, Kilkenny halted his descent and got his bearings. He was facing a few degrees north of due east. When planning this dive, he had factored in the drift caused by the deep ocean current, extrapolating backward from the site of the first piece of wreckage he wanted to survey to his launch point on the surface.

  Kilkenny slowly rotated clockwise, panning the undersea landscape. To calculate shade and shadow, the AD software was programmed to assume the sun was at high noon over the equator. Turning south, he saw a projection of his own shadow on the uneven seabed. To his left, he saw a rounded, man-made shape totally out of place on the rock-strewn plain.

  “Sea Lion, I’ve spotted the first piece of wreckage. Moving in to check it out.”

  “Roger, Nolan. We’ll be watching over your shoulder.”

  The module was one of the smaller surviving fragments of Mir.

  “I’m switching to external lights and video.”

  The rendered image in Kilkenny’s goggles faded, replaced with a view of the real world outside his vision dome. Bits of particulate matter swirled like fine snow around him, disturbed by his thrusters. Bathed in the harsh light of two 75-watt XENOPHOT bulbs, Kilkenny saw with his own eyes the scorched surface of the module.

  It was roughly cylindrical, the center portion being as wide as it was long with smaller diameter connections on each end. One end of the module was half-buried in the silt while the opposite end jutted upward. The exposed end looked as if it had been broken off, the metal was jagged and fractured.

  “If this isn’t part of Mir, I don’t know what to make of it,” Kilkenny said.

  Tao glanced back and forth between the screen and a binder containing schematic drawings and photographs of the former space station, trying to find any identifying details. “I’d say you’re looking at Kvant-1—the astrophysics module.”

  “I’ll take that as a positive ID.”

  Kilkenny moved closer to the module, but was careful not to kick up any silt. It was blackened and covered with a fine layer of sediment. In her e-mail message, Kelsey had told him that she believed an energy weapon had struck both Liberty and the satellite. He slowly searched for any sign of a hole in the metal skin, but found none.

  “That’s all I can do here without rolling this thing over,” Kilkenny said thirty minutes later. “I’m going to move on to the next one.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Owen Moug was seated inside his stateroom, reading a copy of Estleman’s classic western The Master Executioner, when he heard a rap on the door.

  “Come,” he answered.

  Unger entered. “The helicopter reports a positive visual sighting of Sea Lion.”

  Moug looked up from novel. “Distance?”

  “Ten miles.”

  “Have the captain move to intercept. Then tell the men to get ready.”

  Kilkenny’s survey of the fallen Spektr module yielded the same result as Kvant-1. While it bore the scars of a fiery reentry and a punishing impact into the ocean, he found nothing to suggest that a high-energy laser had struck the module.

  The third piece of wreckage from the station was more than twice the size of the first two. Switching back to acoustic daylight for the approach, he saw the module standing upright like a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa. The lower half of the tower was a broad, squat cylinder that tapered into the upper segment. Portions of a further taper at the top on the tower remained, but whatever was attached there had been torn away.

  “What’s this one?” Kilkenny asked

  “Easy call,” Tao replied, “that’s the Core Module. There used to be a connecting node on top, where most of the other modules were tied in.”

  “That explains why it isn’t there anymore—a victim of torque and shear.”

  At depth, the HS5000 glided over the ocean floor at two knots—about the pace of a slow walk. It took Kilkenny thirty minutes to close the distance and begin his third wreck survey of the morning.

  On first pass, Kilkenny immediately noticed one side of the module was buckled inward, almost flattened. Some of the charred metal on that side had broken or chipped away.

  “This might be where it struck the water. At the speed it was traveling, it would’ve been like hitting concrete.”

  Moug sat in the bow of the launch as it pulled alongside Sea Lion. Unger and five men accompanied him on the short trip over from the yacht.

  “Permission to come aboard,” he called up to Peretti and the two deckhands who stood waiting by the starboard rail.

  “Granted,” Peretti answered.

  Lines were passed and Moug climbed up the ladder onto the deck and introductions were made.

  “I apologize for not having contacted you,” Moug explained, “but our radio’s gone out. We’re heading into Valparaiso and I wanted to let the marina know when to expect us and to make arrangements for repairs. Would it be possible to use yours?”

  “Certainly. Follow me.”

  Unger remained on the stern deck with four of the men as Moug followed Peretti inside. The fifth stayed with the launch.

  Under artificial light, Kilkenny’s field of view shrank down to a sphere no more than five feet in diameter. After the clarity of acoustic daylight, he found the restricted view of the real world almost claustrophobic.

  He’d started from the top of the Core Module and slowly circled his way down the blackened tower. Just past the midsection taper, Kilkenny discovered a silver-dollar-sized hole in the module’s smooth aluminum skin.

  “I’m at the
lower half of the module. Were there any external attachments in this area?”

  Tao checked the reference binder. “Doesn’t look like it. I’m seeing solar panels on the upper half, but nothing that far back.”

  Kilkenny moved closer to the hole. Though the edges were charred, he could see that it was elongated, slightly out of round. The HS5000’s powerful lights, mounted near Kilkenny’s waist, cast a dark shadow into the hole. And the closer he came to the module, the less he was able to see.

  “I’m going to try something,” Kilkenny announced as he switched off the external lights.

  Bracing himself against the front of the upper torso, Kilkenny switched on the small flashlight that dangled from a cord around his neck and directed a tight beam into the hole. He adjusted the position of his head, trying to minimize the reflected glare of the vision dome’s concave interior. Then he saw it. The hole wasn’t a surface mount—it went straight through to the interior.

  “Are you seeing this?”

  “Seeing what? Everything went dark as soon as you killed the lights.”

  “This is what we came for. I’m seeing layers inside. This hole goes right through the module.”

  Kilkenny pulled back from the module and turned his exterior lights back on.

  “What are you doing?” Tao asked, once again able to see what was in front of Kilkenny.

  “Checking the other side. That hole was at a downward angle so—”

  Kilkenny lowered himself onto the seabed, tiny clouds of silt spiraling around him, disturbed by the spinning blades of the thrusters. Carefully, he searched for the hole’s mate on the module’s opposite side.

  Peretti led Moug to the radio room. The operator, a young man in his early twenties, was trying to eke a stronger signal out of a distant Latino music station.

  “Sparks, we got a guest who needs to make a—”

  Before Peretti could finish his order, Moug pressed a Glock pistol into his back and pulled back on the trigger. The nine-millimeter bullet exploded in Peretti’s heart and the man staggered forward. Moug pushed him aside and fired twice more into the radioman’s forehead.