Back to the Moon (13 page)

Penny crossed her arms. “I don't have to do anything. I'm not a medical doctor. As far as I'm concerned,
Virgil
can puke his guts out before I help him.”

Amused, Jack watched while High Eagle began to rotate, the action of her crossing her arms causing her to involuntarily demonstrate the law of conservation of angular momentum. It was the same principle that made figure skaters spin. He started to point that out to her but thought better of it. “Then what kind of doctor are you?” he asked. “I suppose we can safely eliminate anything to do with human compassion and care for your fellowman.”

She grabbed a handrail, stopping her spin. “My PhD's in biology. And what the hell are you grinning about?”

“Virgil's a good man, Dr. High Eagle. He has a wife and a little daughter. He's never hurt anyone in his life. He didn't mean for you to get caught up in this and neither did I.”

Penny looked at the big technician, still softly coughing into the plastic bag. She shrugged. “Skip the sob story,” she said. “I'll check on your friend.”

“Thanks.”

“You're not welcome.”

An hour later Penny's stomach had calmed and her bladder was back to normal. She was starting to think clearer too. She decided to try to convince Medaris again to land the shuttle. She found him in the commander's seat. As soon as she got close, he turned and looked quizzically up at her. But Penny didn't look back. She was staring through the cockpit window. She pulled herself to the pilot's seat. “My God...” she whispered. Where there should have been only stars and the blackness of deep space, there was the enormous orange external tank, still firmly attached to
Columbia.
Even with her limited knowledge of the space shuttle, she knew this was not normal. “Why is the tank still attached?”

“We need it for what we have in mind,” he said, his hands busy throwing switches.

“What do you have in mind?”

He uncovered a plastic checklist and began to throw more switches. “We're going to conduct top secret tests in the upper atmosphere. The ET has a storage volume in its base. There's some special equipment there we'll be using.”

Penny's bladder chose that moment to strike again. “I don't believe you!” she declared over her shoulder as she headed back down to the WCS.

“After getting to know you, it is an opinion,” he called after her, raising his voice as she receded,
“that doesn't surprise me!”

* * *

It was probably a few minutes but it seemed like only seconds to Jack before High Eagle was back. “Why did you murder Cassidy?” she demanded.

“It was an accident,” he said irritably. “High Eagle, I don't have time to talk to you right now.” He was inside the difficult procedure required to open the cargo bay doors. They had to be open to release the heat generated by the fuel cells, the devices that provided the shuttle her electrical power. To leave the doors closed could cause the fuel cells to rupture, a catastrophic failure. Jack rushed through the procedure. He wanted to get into the cockpit and take a star sight so he could set the inertial module units to tell
Columbia
exactly where she was.

Penny grabbed his leg, hanging on determinedly. “Call Houston,” she grunted. “Tell them to bring us in.”

Jack gave up trying to reach a switch on an overhead panel, and unwound her. He watched her wrap herself in a defensive ball. Too tired to worry with her, he moved her into the center of the cabin, threw the switch he needed, and moved on to the next panel. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her unwrap and try to reach a handrail. When she couldn't, she yelled at him: “Hey, no fair, you jerk!”

Jack grabbed another procedure manual and soared past her, dodging her hands as he went by. He snagged a handrail, stopped, and considered her. “If I move you so you can hold on to a handrail, will you promise to leave me alone?”

“No way!” She pursed her lips and blew as hard as she could, her cheeks puffing out from the effort. She was trying to blow her way across the deck to where she could grab something. Jack marveled at her effort, shrugged, helped her to a handrail, and kept working.

When she finally managed to snag a handrail, Penny fled down the hatch, into the middeck. “Hey!” she yelled from there. “I'm going to throw switches and stop you!”

Jack wearily went to the hatch to see what she was doing. She was getting tiresome. If only she'd help, just a little. “Stop me from what?” he demanded.

“Whatever it is you're doing,” she said.

“Well, one of the things I'm doing is making sure the fuel cells don't blow up. You sure you want to stop that?”

“What I want is to get back on the ground. Call Houston. I'm going to throw these switches if you don't.”

Jack gave up, came down into the middeck area, still carrying his loop of plastic checklist cards. He got a whiff of her and his nose involuntarily wrinkled. “You need to clean up. Just getting out of your diapers wasn't enough.”

He hadn't meant to insult her, only to point out the obvious. She flushed and crossed her arms in front of her, sending her into a tumble. “Damn you!” she snapped.

“If you used up all the wet wipes, there's some liquid disinfectant soap and towels in locker twelve-E,” he said, wondering what she was so mad about. Then he got back to his switches. Thirty minutes later he was ready to unlatch the doors. They turned on their gears as advertised, opening the bay to the vacuum. He could almost feel the heat from the fuel cells being dissipated. He pulled himself headfirst through the hatchway. So far he hadn't felt even a twinge of SAS. He'd been a scuba diver most of his adult life, spent a lot of time on rocking dive boats, and hadn't been sick there either. He was one of the few lucky ones. In fact, weightlessness seemed to suit him. He did a neat somersault and, without even looking, hooked a footloop with his white-socked toe. He stopped long enough to check Virgil. “How about it, Virg?”

Virgil kept his eyes tightly closed. “Ain't there yet, boss.” He opened one eye and saw the filled sleeping bag beside him. “Hoppy?”

“Yes.”

Before Jack could get back to the flight deck, Penny took the opportunity to tackle him again. She smelled as if she had taken a bath in disinfectant. Jack calmly peeled her off and then left her again stranded in midair. He watched her huff and puff as if she were blowing out a hundred candles on a cake. Using lung power as propulsion was interesting, if mostly ineffective. Still, he had to admire her tenacity. “If you don't stop this, I'm going to tie you up,” he warned.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” she demanded.

“I did already. We have a contract to accomplish some top secret tests with
Columbia
.”

“That's the biggest lie I've ever heard,” she called after him.

Jack studied a set of plastic cue cards, selected one, and soared back to the flight deck. A few minutes later Penny came after him again. She crashed into him, sending them both into a spiraling zero g dance. She grabbed a handrail, but her feet swung up and her forehead smacked into a glass view port.
“Oww! Damnittohell!”

Jack righted himself and took her by her arm to turn her around to face him. He inspected her. He could see a red spot on her forehead, but no real damage had been done. “You've got to move slowly—like this,” he told her, demonstrating with the handrails. “Keep at least a hand on something all the time. And watch your head. It's just like scuba diving inside a shipwreck. Have you ever done that?”

She seemed to be searching his eyes, as if she was going to learn something from them. “Do you have any idea who you've kidnapped?” she finally asked.

“You didn't answer my question,” he said, tiredly. “Have you ever been wreck diving?”

She bumped her head on the ceiling. “Owww! Does visiting the
Titanic
count?”

“Were you in a submarine?”

“Of course!”

“Then it doesn't count.” He flew easily to a bulkhead, turned, and came back, hooking a footloop with his toe to show her how to do it. “See? It's easy.”

“Skip the Peter Pan lessons, okay?” she said crossly.

Jack needed to get back to work. He was far behind the planned timeline. He ran his index finger down a card, then looked up at a panel and threw some switches. “If I give you one of these cue cards, do you think you could find the correct panel, throw the switches required?” It was worth another try.

She drew herself up, at least as much as she could considering she was hanging at an angle to the deck. “I already told you, I'm not going to help you.”

“Suit yourself.” Jack had pulled some half-glasses from his coveralls and looked over them at her.

“Look, I know I'm excess baggage here. You killed Cassidy. Are you going to kill me?”

Jack understood. If he'd been in the woman's situation, he might have wondered the same thing. “Hoppy was working with us. He... accidentally dropped a pistol. It went off and a ricochet got him.”

“Liar!” she spat. “Tell me the truth.”

Logical answers didn't seem to work with her. “I don't know. I might throw you out of the hatch if you don't let me work.”

“Stay away from me,” she commanded, flying over to another panel, “or I'll throw these switches!”

He peered at her and then the panel her hand was over. “Please don't,” he said. “It would be a disaster.”

She drew her hand away. “Why? What would happen?”

“Our food would be cold. Those switches control power to the galley.”

She glowered. “You think you're so damn smart, don't you?”

Jack sighed, got back to work, but he did so with a lighter heart. The woman was at least amusing and so ignorant of shuttle systems, she was harmless. He didn't hear her moving below so he assumed she had gone into a pout. It was a bad assumption.

SMC, JSC

CAPCOM Kelly Niven's head snapped up. Sam waved at her. He would handle this. “Penny, this is Houston. My name's Sam Tate, the flight director. Are you all right?”

Her voice came in loud but the transmission was broken, dirty. “Yes. No. What do... think? I'm stuck up... two hijackers and a dead m... I'm speaking from th... middeck.”

“Who's dead?” Sam asked.

“Hop. . . sidy. They may have. . . him.. . . says it was an accident. I don't know.”

“Cassidy? He wasn't on the crew. He's not even an active astronaut.”

He heard the exasperation in her voice. “Don't you think. . . that? Shut up and. . . n. The leader's name. . . medium height, salt-and-pepper hair, got what looks to be. . . crawling up his neck and jaw. . . forty to forty-five years old, not a bad-looking guy. Not as good looking as I bet he thinks he is but. . . a big, heavy guy. Could be John Goodman's twin. His. . . Virgil...”

Tate keyed the mike. “What are they doing now?”

“. . . postinsertion activation checklists. By the way, the external tank is still attached. . . supposed to be, is it?”

Sam looked at his assistant Flight, Jim Crowder, who in turn gave him a thumbs-up. “Confirmed,” he said. After main engine cutoff, MECO,
Columbia
was supposed to go into a five-mile dive, a roller coaster ride designed to push the ET to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. According to the telemetry
Columbia
had not followed her standard internal software, instead climbing smoothly into a high 550-mile orbit with her ET still firmly attached.

“A patch?” Sam guessed.

“Yeah. Somehow, someway, somebody sent them a goddamned software patch,” Crowder growled.

Sam keyed the mike. “We know about the ET, Penny. Did they say why they're aboard?”

“They haven't. . . with me. . . told me something but. . . all I can tell you now is that Jack's checking. . . know what he's doing.”

Sam's brow knitted. “How is it you're allowed to talk?”

Sam strained to hear but there was only a hiss emanating from his headset. He looked down into the control room. Niven shook her head. “Penny, this is Houston,” Sam tried. “Do you hear me? Are you all right?”

There was a moment more of silence and then a man's voice came down over the air-to-ground loop. “She's fine, Hou...” the man said, static cutting him off. Sam strained to hear the voice.

“We're all fine except for...” the voice continued. “He deserves a memorial service at least. He. . . great American hero. Remember. . . might hear over the next couple of days.
Columbia,
out.”

“Columbia,”
Sam said. “This is Houston.
Columbia,
answer, dammit!”

“They're gone, Flight,” Commtech said.

Sam lowered his head, resisted another kick to his poor battered chair. “Dammittohell in a handbasket,” he muttered.

Columbia

Jack tucked the headset in his belt. “Cute,” he said over his shoulder as he opened a middeck locker. “Most of what we said probably was broken up. The Ku-band antenna isn't aimed properly yet.”

Penny grabbed a handrail. “I can tell you're tired, Medaris. You're not going to be able to pull this off. Give it up. Talk to Houston. They might be able to land us automatically.”

Jack didn't reply but opened a locker door marked SAREX
—Space Amateur Radio Experiment.
“While I set this up, how about stowing those seats?”

She started to argue but he held up his hand in tired supplication. “Just do it, High Eagle. The stowage procedure is in a pouch on the back of the chair.” He patted the panel in front of him. “This is a shortwave set. In ten minutes, maybe less, I'll have it ready. Then, I promise, you'll get some answers.”

Penny went to the seats and started unlatching them.
At least she's got some mechanical ability,
Jack thought, and then pulled the drawer out of the SAREX locker and unstowed a laptop computer from another locker. By the time she had finished strapping the seats to the wall, he was keying in a message, the words appearing in orange letters on a flat panel screen.