Back to the Moon (14 page)

ON ORBIT. ACTIVATION PROCEEDING.

There was a whir of the diskette in the laptop and then the muffled sound of the dits and dots of a code. Jack looked at his watch. In a moment the screen went black and then a message appeared:

RECVD. NEWS ON TV IS SAYING AN UNUSUAL LAUNCH. NO DETAILS YET.

Jack cleared the screen.

CASSIDY WAS KILLED—AN ACCIDENT.

A moment passed, a shocked moment it seemed to Jack.

WILL YOU CONTINUE?

YES. SOMEBODY NEEDS ANSWERS HERE. WE ENDED UP WITH AN UNEXPECTED PASSENGER. TELL HER WE HAVE A CONTRACT. TELL HER ABOUT PLAN D.

Jack hoped Sally would remember what plan D was. It was a cover story.

The laptop whirred.

IDENTIFY.

PENNY HIGH EAGLE.

COOL!

“It's cool, all right,” Jack grumbled, and then, seeing that she had pulled herself back to him, gestured at the keyboard. “Well? Go ahead. Ask away.”

She cautiously positioned herself in front of the laptop. Her feet scuffled against the deck.

“Use those footloops,” he said, pointing.

“Who's on the other end?” she demanded, working her feet into the cloth straps.

“MEC Control.”

“Meck? What does that stand for?”

“It's another acronym. Medaris Engineering Company.”

“Engineering? What kind of engineering?”

“Rocket engineering. Never mind. Hurry up!”

“You don't have to snap my head off!” she snapped.

Jack ached to close his eyes, just for a moment, to let blessed sleep take over.. . . He shook his head, trying desperately to clear his mind, to focus on what had to be done. “I'm sorry, Your Royal High Eagleness”—he sighed—”but I still don't have the Ku-band antenna completely configured yet, mainly because of you hanging off my leg. We'll be out of range soon. Ask your questions.”

“This is stupid,” she said. “The only question I have is when are we going to land?”

Sighing, he tapped in a question for her.

TELL ME WHAT IS HAPPENING.

“Now watch.”

She watched.

THE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA HAS BEEN LEASED BY MEC FOR THE PURPOSE OF TOP SECRET TESTS.

Penny frowned at the monitor. “What the hell?” Jack had gone back to his checklist, deliberately ignoring her. “What kind of tests?”

“Don't ask me,” he said, looking up at a control panel, desperately throwing switches while he had her distracted. “Ask them.”

WHAT KIND OF TESTS?

The laptop whirred.

THE TESTS ARE TOP SECRET. BUT THIS WILL BE YOUR GREATEST ADVENTURE.

The message stopped. Penny's fingers flew across the keyboard.

CALL NASA FBI CIA AIR FORCE ARMY NAVY MARINES COAST GUARD SUPERMAN BATMAN AND GET ME DOWN NOW!!!!!!

“We've gone out of range,” Jack said as he went by on his way to another panel. “We'll catch them on the next pass.”

She suddenly launched herself at him, clutching the collar of his coveralls with both hands. “Medaris, I'm telling you, get me down,
now!”

He extricated himself, holding her by the shoulder at arm's length. “Now listen to me, High Eagle. You're here with us. Neither of us wanted it that way but that's the way it is and you might as well get used to it. Don't make me tie you up.”

She squinted. “If I don't do something, I'm going to start puking again,” she confessed.

“You have experiments aboard, don't you? Get busy. Activate them!”

Her eyes widened. “Dammit! I've forgotten FLEA!”

“FLEA?”

“The Feline Lateral Epistemology Attitude experiment! I'm responsible for it!”

“The feline
what?”

SMC, JSC

Sam took the call on the land line. It had been reported as urgent. Bonner was on the other end. “What's the latest, Sam?” he asked.

Sam related in detail the call from the payload specialist, Penny High Eagle. “According to her the ET is still attached,” he finished. “Why that is, I have no idea.”

“Care to speculate?”

“I'm too old to speculate,” Sam said.

Bonner pressed. “The external tank is empty on orbit, isn't it?”

“Might be a few gallons sloshing around,” Sam relented.

“Could they use it to start up the main engines again?”

It was a good question. “I don't think so. Once the pumps are down, they stay down. There's also likely to be ice in the propellant lines.”

“What's an empty ET good for, Sam?”

Sam had seen some studies. “There's folks who think you could use an ET to make a space station. Lot of empty volume. Take a hell of a lot of reconfiguring, though.”

Bonner was quiet. Likely, Sam thought, he was trying to decide something, needed information, and that's why he'd called. “What are you going to do now?” Bonner asked.

“Sit right here and monitor
Columbia
.”

“If you were so ordered, could you do her some damage, foul up her computers, something like that?”

The way Bonner had asked the question, the tone in his voice, Sam was immediately on his guard. “I'd have to check on that,” he said, stalling for time. He'd already made up his mind that he wasn't going to be party to anything that was going to do damage to his bird.

“Do it, Sam, and get back to me.”

“All right, Frank, I will.” When Bonner signed off, Sam slowly lowered the receiver to the base set. “Approximately when the devil makes snowballs,” he muttered.

Columbia

Penny dived for a bottom locker and slid out a tray holding a white box with a cooling fan on top. She opened the lid and a slightly dazed black-and-white cat emerged, clutching her arm.

Medaris moved in beside her. His mouth dropped open. “A cat?”

“His name is Paco. He's part of a vestibular acclimation experiment. The principal investigator believed that if a cat could acclimate to zero g, anything could. Sort of a worst case.”

“What about food? Is he going to catch mice or what?”

She glared at him. “NASA put plenty of food on board for him, Medaris. You're the uninvited guest here, I believe.”

He shook his head, looked her in the eye. “Are you healthy enough to take care of this animal?”

“Don't you worry about me and Paco, ace,” she growled. When he rewarded her with a hefty purr, she whispered in the cat's ear, “We'll be just fine, won't we, boy?”

Paco struggled out of her arms and leapt for the hatchway. Medaris followed the cat. “Get off that panel, Paco!” she heard him call. “No, not those switches! Bad cat! Bad! Bad!”

Certain that she was going to get sick again if she didn't get busy with something, she proceeded with the activation of her cell culture experiments, which were supposed to be her reason for being in space. After she put the last sample in the incubator, she got an idea and quietly checked the medical kit. She found it clinging to a filter, the air distribution system sucking everything loose toward it. The kit had a range of drugs, both injectables and oral, some of them potentially lethal. She also found two scalpels. She considered the instruments and then put them back into their holsters. She was prepared to anesthetize the spacejackers if she had to, but she didn't think she could cut them up.

Feeling suddenly very tired, she went to the cockpit, settling into the left seat. She closed her eyes but was startled by Medaris crawling into the seat beside her. His face was drawn by fatigue. “You can sit there,” he said. “Just don't touch anything. IMUs are probably already sliding toward an error mode,” he muttered. “I'll need the star tracker. No, dammit, I need the COAS.” He pointed toward her right knee. “Get that flat plastic plate out for me, okay? It's in that Velcroed cover.”

“I refuse to help you in any way,” Penny asserted.

He reached across her lap, grumpily jerked the device from its holster, and peered blearily at the cockpit computer monitor. “Strap yourself in,” he ordered.

“What are you doing?” she worried, trying to see the computer screen.

“I've called up the maneuver display board for the orbital maneuvering system.”

Penny leaned over and looked at his monitor. “You're changing our orbit?”

“Very good, Doctor,” he said sarcastically. “Go to the head of your class.” When she pushed in closer, he leaned back and looked at her. “How come you're squinting all the time? You need to borrow my glasses?”

She blinked, opened her eyes wide. It embarrassed her when she was caught. “It's a bad habit,” she confessed. “I do it when I'm confused. . . or thinking.”

Jack shrugged and went back to the keyboard.

“What are you doing now?”

He let out a long, weary breath. “I'm putting in the engine selection and the trim load.” He kept tapping. “Don't forget the external tank mass,” he said, apparently to himself. She certainly didn't know what he was talking about. “Burn solution coming up.”

Penny was nervously gripping her seat and squinting. She couldn't help it. He looked at her over his glasses. “Relax. I'm just making a little change in delta V to catch up with an old friend. On my mark, ten-nine-eight-seven. . . OMS burn now!”

Penny heard a muffled thunderclap,
Columbia
shuddering her length. The burn lasted for only a few seconds and then abruptly shut down. “IMUs are good,” he muttered. “Let's see what the optical alignment sight says. I'll aim it at that little ol' star there.” He held the instrument to his eye, turned knobs on its side. “On the money,” he said at length. He put the instrument down, rubbed his eyes.

Penny heard a noise above her and then saw Paco on the ceiling, trotting unconcernedly across it, his claws leaving little nicks in the spongy material. Jack gave him an upside-down pat and he promptly ran down his arm into his lap.

Columbia
was again moving into nightfall. “Look at that!” Jack pointed as the cat curled up in his lap.

Penny followed his gesture. There were no stars. A full moon had dazzled them away as if it demanded its own velvet backdrop. She turned and was surprised to see Jack had fallen asleep, just like that. Paco had also tucked his head in, was making contented squeezing movements with his two front paws. Except for the whirs and clicks and gurgles of
Columbia,
it was quiet on the flight deck. Outside, the dark line of night swept inexorably toward them. For the first time since the launch, which seemed a hundred years ago, Penny could go anywhere, do anything she wanted. Now was the time to get the medication. She could render both spacejackers unconscious for a very long time, get on the horn, call Houston, and get
Columbia
in on automatic. She could do it. Nothing could stop her. And she might have done it, too, if only she hadn't watched Jack and Paco sleep for just a little longer than she should have, and then fallen completely, utterly asleep herself.

MISSION ELAPSED TIME: 1 DAY AND COUNTING . . .

THE CAMP DAVID CONFERENCE

Thirty-one Thousand Feet over the Outer Banks, North Carolina

At oh-dark-thirty Ollie Grant had been in a teleconference with John Lakey, chief of the Astronaut Office, and Frank Bonner. The conference was short and to the point. Bonner led the discussion. To just sit and idly watch while hijackers operated the shuttle, he said, was a sacrilege to NASA. He outlined his plan. Lakey said little. Grant enthusiastically endorsed Bonner's bold scheme. It was settled. She was the commander of STS-128. No matter she'd been left behind, it was still her mission, her bird.

Grant screamed off the Cape runway in her T-38 and rocked into the cool dense morning air. An hour later she streaked past Kitty Hawk, throttled back over the Potomac, and landed at Andrews Air Force Base. A sedan with the NASA meatball symbol on its doors waited for her on the tarmac. Lights flashing, its driver sped her out of the airport, heading east to Camp David.

She arrived at the presidential retreat two hours later, just in time for the meeting. She entered the conference room in the Rosewood House and noticed a large picture window that presented a quiet, forested panorama. A bucolic view, she thought, for a team gathered to crisis-manage the hijacking of her space shuttle. She looked around the gathering and saw the Air Force contingent. They waved her over. “Hey, NASA,” General Bud Carling called jovially, “come slum with us blue suiters.” In a room full of strangers she gratefully took a seat behind him. Carling had been her F-15 wing commander in Germany before she'd received her assignment to NASA. She shook his hand, met the rest of his contingent, a group of nonpilot Space Command commandos. Technically sharp, she assumed, but none of them were up to her standards. If you weren't a pilot, you weren't worth much in her book. “Listen, Ollie,” Carling said quietly, leaning in close. “Sorry about all this. No pilot likes to think about somebody else's butt being in his seat.”

“Whoever it is is dead meat, Bud,” Grant replied, bristling.

“Take it easy, lady,” Carling advised. “This is now in the hands of the big boys.”

If that was supposed to make Grant feel better, Carling had failed.
The big boys?
He might as well have slapped her in the face. She turned away from him, perused the assembly. Besides the Air Force the group included representatives of the Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency. Bonner sat at the front of the table. He kept snapping his fingers and flunkies kept conferring with him and flying off at a dead run. One of them came back with a muffin, another with a cup of coffee. Bonner was an enigma to Grant. He was a solid engineer and manager. A lot of people at JSC said there would have been no shuttle program, no International Space Station, no astronaut corps, if it weren't for his continuing struggle against NASA's foes. But he could also, on a dime it seemed, turn into a savage adversary of one of his own people. Everyone who worked for Bonner was afraid of him. It got him acquiescence to his commands but it got him little respect and very little loyalty. Then there were the stories from her fellow women astronauts. During some of the late-night bull sessions a few of the women astronauts had admitted they'd gone to the Rawhide, and then let Bonner take them home and climb on top of them. Grant had slugged one of the women who had confessed to having sex with Bonner and said it was going to get her a command position. That wasn't the astronaut corps Grant had signed up to fly with!