Back to the Moon (17 page)

Corbin shook his head, trying to get his ears to stop ringing. He heard a newer, thankfully quieter voice over his headset, apparently the radar operator at Eglin. “Still tracking, sir.. . . Number is. . . just a minute, sir. It's
I
for India, one four lima. Official listing says it's a commsat launched on an Indian
Shiva
rocket three months ago. According to this it never came on-line. It's a DODO, sir.”

DODO. Corbin sorted through his mental list of acronyms. Dead Object Drifting in Orbit.
What the hell was Columbia doing rendezvousing with a misfired Indian communications satellite?
He switched off Eglin, went to his direct black phone link to General Carling at the Air Force Space Command in Colorado. “General Carling, sir? Clay Corbin here. Yes sir, the Keyhole's being moved. Sir, I've got some other news. Yes, sir. About a DODO...”

ORBITAL RENDEZVOUS

Columbia

Penny's eyes fluttered open. She was still seated in the cockpit. A quick check of her watch revealed she had been in a deep sleep for just under eight hours. An unfamiliar land mass scrolled below—a white scraggly line of snowcapped peaks in an otherwise brown corrugated plain. In just moments the mountain range was gone and the land smoothed and turned green until an abrupt coastline marked the beginning of a blue sparkling sea. She guessed that she had seen some little piece of the Himalayas and then
Columbia
had crossed down over India to the Sea of Bengal. The entire world appeared to be unscrolling beneath her. It was truly difficult to comprehend. But Penny liked it. Her stomach growled, evidence that it had adapted to zero gravity. Stretching, she unstrapped and floated free. She was startled to see Paco curled asleep on the roof, his claws hooked into the material that covered it. Her movement woke the cat up and he stretched, careful to keep his claws embedded in the material. When Penny petted him, he responded with a purr.

She heard movement in the middeck.
Columbia
's crew cabin, smaller than she had remembered from her limited training, consisted of two levels, the flight deck (where she was) and beneath it the middeck (so called because it was located in between the flight deck and an equipment bay). On the flight deck forward there were two seats for the pilots behind banks of controls and monitors and a six-paneled windshield; the aft flight deck had a set of control panels covered with switches and lights plus five view ports—two overhead and three more looking down the cargo bay.

Penny cautiously used the handrails to pull herself to each of the view ports, to see what she could see. At the cargo bay windows she was surprised to see someone in a spacesuit going down the port sill of the bay, pulling a blue-wrapped object behind. It was a sleeping bag. The suited man stopped, gathered the bag to himself. Penny was certain it held Cassidy's body. Whoever was in the suit, and Penny knew it had to be Medaris, paused as if in prayer, then gathered in a book attached to a tether at his waist. She grabbed a headset in time to hear him speak:

O Jehovah, our Lord, how glorious is thy name in all the earth! Thou hast displayed Thy majesty above the heavens.

When I observe Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established:

What is man that Thou are mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou carest for him?

Yet Thou hast made him little less than heavenly beings, and Thou dost crown him with glory and honor.

Medaris released the tethered book—Penny assumed it was a Bible—and held the foot of the sleeping bag with one hand while saluting with the other. “Into Your hands,” Penny heard him say, “I commit the spirit of Colonel Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, a father, an American, a patriot.”

Moved by his words, Penny watched Medaris push Cassidy into space, tipping the bag as he did. The bag, now a burial shroud, started tumbling end over end until it had become little more than a speck against the white-and-blue planet far below. Medaris gathered up the Bible and made his way back down the sill. Penny found that her heart was pounding. As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, she was frightened of the man in the suit coming her way. There was much she found appealing about him—he'd been gentle with her, after all, while she had tried to interfere with the systems activation, and Paco liked him, that was always a good sign when a cat took to a man—but that scar, and the way he could get so gruff with her. . . Of course, the way he and she had verbally barraged each other yesterday—that had been fun, she had to admit. Perhaps dangerous fun, she thought, turning it around. Medaris was, after all, some sort of master criminal, a shuttle spacejacker. She liked that term:
spacejacker.
It would look good in her book if she lived long enough to write it. She thought again of the Demerol and other drugs she'd hidden away. She should have used them. Maybe it wasn't too late. When the spacejacker came through the hatch of the airlock, he'd be vulnerable.

Penny, still not certain what she was going to do, descended through the open hatchway to the middeck. The middeck was essentially nothing but an aluminum box smaller than one of the walk-in closets at her leased house in Malibu. Forward was a wall of white stowage lockers. The starboard wall held sleeping bags and the minuscule galley. Aft, there was a cylindrical airlock. She remembered its purpose: to seal off an astronaut going outside, allowing the air within to be evacuated without affecting the other astronauts in the main cabin. Beside the airlock, behind a plastic curtain, was the WCS. The entrance hatch, which had a small porthole, was dogged to the port wall. Rumor had it the toilet got smelly after a day or two. Penny could only hope they wouldn't be in orbit long enough for that to happen.

Virgil was out of his sleeping bag and at the galley, his back to her. Then the airlock opened and Medaris, dressed in shorts and a rugby shirt, came through it. Behind him the suit he had doffed floated eerily, legs and arms quivering as if it were alive. He saw Penny. “Feeling better?”

Penny didn't think his query sounded sincere. She studied him for a moment. “I saw and heard what you did. It was beautifully done, I must admit.”

He nodded, his face grim. “The Psalms are always appropriate.”

Virgil approached her, holding a plastic bottle. Penny saw that he looked almost human again, the SAS apparently dispelled. “Mornin', ma'am,” he greeted her in a voice laden with respect. “Got some coffee ready for you.” He handed her the squeeze bottle. “Sorry it ain't any hotter. They got it regulated so it won't melt the plastic.”

Hot or not, Penny took the coffee greedily and carried it with her even though she was headed for the toilet. When she came out, Medaris had gone up to the flight deck. Starving, she hooked a foot in a foot loop and dug into the scrambled eggs and ham slices Virgil handed to her on a cellophane-covered plastic tray. He busied himself at the galley, cleaning up. She watched his wide back as he wiped down the rehydrator with a sponge. There seemed to be no harm in the man whatever. “Virgil...”

He turned eagerly. “Yes, ma'am? Ma'am, I'm really sorry about all this. My little girl—well, I'm a pad rat, ma'am, or I used to be before I started to work for Jack. We all lost our jobs and Lori, that's my wife, was crazy worried about Dawn—my daughter has cystic fibrosis, ma'am—but Jack's taken care of everything for us. And then he needed me for this mission. I had to come along. Now, ma'am, I need to tell you something else....”

Penny listened in astonishment at the torrent of information. “Slow down, Virgil,” she said, “take a breath.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He hung listlessly from the galley handrail and then rubbed his haggard face. “Whew! I'm still beat!” A look came over his face and Penny realized his SAS was far from over. He grabbed a plastic bag and headed for the WCS.

She felt a rush of empathy. For a spacejacker and master criminal Virgil seemed, well, nice. After polishing off another package of eggs and ham, doing her best to ignore the gagging sounds emanating from the toilet
—there was no privacy on this grunge bucket—
Penny went to the flight deck. Medaris was at the view ports that looked down the cargo bay. She remembered enough from her training to recognize that his hand was on the joystick for the shuttle arm. She hooked a footloop beside him. He gripped the pistol joystick and ordered the arm up and out, at the same time rotating open the end effector, a cylindrical cage that could grasp a special probe by tightening a triangle of cable around it. The arm rose slowly as he tested it, bending at the elbow and then at the wrist, silhouetted against the blue earth rushing below.

“How do you know how to do that?” she asked, astonished.

“I helped design the RMS.”

Penny stared at him. “Who the hell
are
you?”

“There it is!” Medaris announced suddenly. “Look at her! Perfect! One little RCS burn and I'll have us snugged up.”

“RMS, RCS?” Penny questioned resignedly.

Medaris turned to a gray laptop bolted to a control panel and keyed in some numbers. “Remote manipulating system, reaction control system,” he said without looking at Penny. After a few seconds she felt
Columbia
tremble, then begin to rotate.

To Penny it appeared that the earth was actually doing the rotating, an optical illusion that not only made her dizzy but had the entire planet turning away from the cargo bay, leaving her to face the deep black velvet of empty space. Except it wasn't empty. Something big floated down toward the cargo bay centerline, a giant cylinder wrapped partially in gold foil. On the side nearest
Columbia
she could see what she recognized from some NASA manual she'd read as a grapple fixture, a knobbed stalk on a circular plate. Whatever it was, it had been designed to be captured by the shuttle's arm—or RMS, she thought.
God, I'm starting to understand this stuff!

“Come to Papa,” Medaris breathed.

Penny watched as the arm moved toward the satellite's grapple. The end effector swallowed it and the RMS folded back on itself under his steady hand. After it was about ten feet over the cargo bay, he shut the arm down.

“What is that thing?” Penny asked, trying not to sound as awestruck as she felt.

Jack tidied up the RMS, locking it into place. “Two stacked rocket engines. I'm going to remove the shuttle mains and put one of those, the big one, in their place.”

“Why—why would you do that?”

“Because the mains are no good to us now. And because we need the new engine for our experiments.”

“You're going to get us killed, aren't you?” she said in a burst of comprehending clarity.

He didn't even bother to look at her, just kept diddling with the damn computer. “No, High Eagle, I'm going to do what my contract stipulates.”

She impulsively grabbed his hand, stopped him from keying anything else into the keyboard. “I crave the moment when I am allowed to see that sacred document.”

Medaris pried her hand off. “It might be on board here somewhere. I'll ask Virgil to find it for you.”

Then he smiled and Penny decided it was a handsome smile, a bit too cocky, but really quite nice. She hated him for it.

SMC, JSC

Houston was still on the job, quietly monitoring
Columbia.
After the Air Force, busy with its own plans, had stopped updating the ground track on
Columbia,
Tate's Turds had reverted to their own devices, using the shuttle's S-band hemiantennas for line-of-sight location fixes. Every time
Columbia
came over the horizon near a fixed NASA ground station, they had her. That was why, when
Columbia
shifted her orbit, Sam was informed by the GUIDO controller. “Update the track,” he ordered. As he watched, the big wall screen on the front left of the control room presented the new orbital graphic. “Not much of a mod,” he mused.

“They activated the Ku-band radar during the last pass,” the INCO controller said. INCO handled instruments and communications.

“And the RMS is powered up,” EECOM chimed in. EECOM managed the electrical systems.

“How do you know?”

“Normal traffic,” both controllers answered in unison.

Sam leaned back in his bent chair and absently adjusted his headset. “Normal traffic,” he said to himself, though aloud.

“What do you think that means?” Crowder said from the chair beside him.

“It means either these guys don't care if we get health and status or they don't know how to turn it off. And I would bet against the latter.”

“They want us to know what they're doing?”

“Maybe they want us to help them out, if it comes to that,” Sam mused. “That makes sense. They can't watch everything. Maybe they're hoping we'll do our jobs just as in any flight. No skin off their tails if we do.”

Crowder thought about it for a moment. “So we're helping them just by monitoring their systems?”

The anger Sam had felt the day before had dissipated. “She's our old
Columbia.
We'll watch over her.” He keyed his headset mike. “How about it, INCO? What's going on with
Columbia
's radar?”

“They swiveled the Ku-band dish a few minutes ago,” she answered. “Pulse wave readings would indicate they got a positive lock on something.”

“Can you tell what it is?”

“Negative, Flight.”

“Keep me advised.”

“Roger that.”

“Flight? This is FIDO.”

FIDO, flight dynamics. “Go, FIDO.”

“
Columbia
just made an RCS burn.”

Columbia
was using her radar and now she was maneuvering. A rendezvous situation. That was a damned dangerous thing even with the assistance of Shuttle Mission Control.

“Sam,” a familiar voice over his headset crackled, “this is Owen Parker. Got a minute?” Parker was one of the payload operations directors, a POD in the Payload Operations Control Center up in Huntsville.