Back to the Moon (25 page)

Sam pushed his long, bony finger into the astronaut's chest. “You listen to me. This control room was built to protect spacecraft, not to harm them. And as long as I'm in charge, that's the way it's going to be. I don't want to see you in here again.”

“You can't banish me from the control room, Sam. I'm the chief of astronauts.”

Sam grabbed him by his collar, spun him around, and pushed him in the direction of the security guard at the door. “Take him out of here and flush his clearance,” he ordered the guard. Then he went back to his console, knowing his hours in Shuttle Mission Control were numbered. He punched up all the loops. “SMC, this is Flight. Forget what you just saw. The director is having a bad day. If I hear a word of this on television or read anything about it in the newspapers, I'll find out who did it and have their hide. Understand?” When no reply came, Sam gave the room a good vulture and then as good a smile as he could summon up. “CAPCOM, get
Columbia
back. Let's see if we can help them for a change.”

Columbia

Jack was knocked against the propellant line. It broke, a blast of bluish spray erupted, just missing him. Penny lunged for the line, grabbed it, twisted it away from both of them toward the aft bulkhead. It stopped spraying, a valve upstream snapping into place. But her suit felt strange. She looked down at her right glove, saw the reason. The fuel had eaten away some of the material from the tip of the index finger. Reflexively, she pressed the finger to her suit.
Wrong move.
More of the material sloughed off. She gasped for air, a fog of moisture beginning to condense on her faceplate....

Jack gripped a dangling bundle of cables and pulled toward Penny, arriving just as she started to subside into unconsciousness, her arms waving in front of her. He pinched the affected glove but the material was too degraded to seal. Even in zero g the suit seemed to sag on her, the awesome vacuum pulling the life out of her. The internal wrist seal wasn't working. There was only one thing he could do. He had heard it discussed as a contingency among the astronauts, always dismissed as impossible. He squeezed the latches on her glove and pulled it off, pushing her hand back inside the arm and then swinging the aluminum wrist joint against the folds of his outer suit, creating a temporary seal. He was rewarded with the sight of her suit filling, the emergency 6,000 psi oxygent tank inside automatically venting. Behind the fog of her faceplate he saw her eyes flutter and then open. “Relax, High Eagle, I've got you.”

“Medaris, I don't feel so good.”

He looked at her DCS readout. The pressure was still down. He braced his feet and dug into the bag at his waist for a roll of duct tape. He couldn't think about it. He had to do it.

He unlatched the wrist of his left-hand glove, stripped it off. His hand emerged momentarily into the icy chill of space before he plunged it inside the open arm of her suit. A hot fire shot up his hand to the wrist seal, the capillaries of his exposed skin bursting. He clamped the two rings of the space-suit arms together and wrapped the gray tape around them, once, twice, three times. The blinking numbers on her chest pack told the story. Pressure dropping, shutdown imminent. . . He started another wrap of tape.

Virgil ran his hands over his face again and again, trying to get control of himself. He stared back into the payload bay. He would have to go out and get them. Not that it would matter. He was as dead as they. He couldn't land a shuttle, not with it tumbling like it was, and he didn't know how to stop it.

He heard Sam's voice. “
Columbia,
Houston. Fire up your computers. We'll get you out of your tumble. It must've been the ice. All the valves stuck open. We'll get 'em closed.”

Virgil did as he was told without comment. Within a minute the RCS thrusters started to pump forward and aft.
Columbia
settled down. That was when a movement in the cargo bay caught his attention. “Hey!” he screamed at the universe. “Hey! Would you look at that!”

Before his disbelieving eyes Jack Medaris and Penny High Eagle were coming down the sill toward the safety of the airlock hatch. The real miracle was they appeared to be holding hands!

THE VEEP'S PARTY

The Vice President's Residence

The vice president's official residence was on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, a rambling brick house on a broad green lawn. It looked more like a museum than a place to live but Vanderheld had put his stamp on it, turning it into a stately mansion filled with artwork and the veep's eclectic collections of butterflies and books. To help along the World Energy Treaty, he had decided to hold a party for the Senate. Vanderheld would remind them of the President's journey to Baghdad. The treaty Edwards had gone to broker was tied, he'd explain, to WET. With WET's restrictions on dangerous alternative energy schemes, oil was all the more important to the United States. The Middle East needed to be a stable region. Iraq and Iran were the keys to that. Vanderheld was known as a great storyteller. He was wowing a group of half-drunk senators with his story about the time, as a very young man, he'd climbed the Matterhorn. “I looked around for my guide and saw him sitting down on this ledge,” he said to their grins. “What's wrong, Günter?' I asked. He threw up his hands. “I came to climb, not run, up this mountain, Herr Vanderheld!”

While the appreciative audience chuckled, Vanderheld spotted the attorney general and FBI Director Mark Hennessey coming in an hour late for the party. Hennessey saw him at the same time, said something to Hawthorne, and came up to the veep. “Sir, the attorney general and I need to talk to you.”

Vanderheld raised his eyebrows. “Is it that important I should leave my guests?”

“Yes, sir.”

Vanderheld shrugged, led the way into his study. The AG was wearing a gown that hung off her big shoulders like a black tent. She shook the veep's hand, patted him on the shoulder, but that was as far as she went. She never gave out hugs. “I thought you needed to hear this right away, sir. The committee of federal judges I appointed to study the contract that damned southern lawyer has been waving around has come in with an opinion. They tell me it's likely to hold up in court. In other words, it's a legal contract between this MEC outfit and the government, signed and sealed by that idiot the President has for a secretary of the Department of Transportation.”

Vanderheld absorbed her rapid-fire delivery. “Why does DOT have anything to do with the shuttle?”

Hawthorne snorted. “The space business, especially the launching of commercial payloads, is so full of overlapping agencies and congressional mandates, it's a fool's paradise. DOT has a piece of it and so does the Department of Commerce, and they're always wrangling for a bigger share. The contract specialists at DOT liked the idea that the MEC contract would establish DOT as a player in lining up shuttle payloads.” Hawthorne sighed, shook her head. “The devil is always in the details. There's one paragraph in there that can be interpreted to mean if MEC pays a million to DOT and a million to NASA, it gets exclusive use of the shuttle, period. It doesn't say that they have to do anything other than pay the money. And it doesn't say that they have to adhere to any schedule other than their own.”

“Tammy, let me get this straight,” Vanderheld said. “You're telling me that the
Columbia
hijack is legal?”

“I'm telling you exactly that, sir. Oh, we can get them for little technicalities on safety and so on, might even get them for endangering the astronauts in the elevator, but their presence aboard the shuttle is covered by their contract.”

Vanderheld walked to the window, looked out into the darkness.
“Endeavour
has launched,” he said stiffly. “It was against my better judgment, frankly. I told the President that. Bernie Sykes convinced him otherwise. I fear someone will be hurt up there.”

“Well, maybe you should call it off,” Hawthorne said. “Especially since it looks like those old boys are up there more or less quasilegal.”

“I don't think the President will agree, Tammy,” Vanderheld said sadly. “He just wants this over. It looks bad for him while he's trying to negotiate a peace treaty in Iraq.”

“Well, God bless America,” Hawthorne said sarcastically. “This is going to be a bloody mess when it hits the courts.”

Vanderheld turned, his face a mask of concern. “The courts will figure something out, find a compromise, if it ever gets that far.
I
worry about the children of this country. What will they think when they see on television that their space shuttle has been attacked by another one?”

Hawthorne snorted. “I think the little rug rats will get over it.”

Vanderheld shook his head. “No, Tammy, you're wrong.” He sighed, put his hand on his ceiling-high bookcase, dragged his fingers across a row of books as if they might impart some wisdom to him when he needed it the most. “It is a traumatic thing we're doing to them this day, I fear. Perhaps to the nation at large.”

MET 3 DAYS AND COUNTING . . .

RAID OF THE ENDEAVOUR

Endeavour

Endeavour
's pursuit of
Columbia
began at MECO, main engine cutoff, and lasted twelve hours. With Ollie Grant at her side, Pilot Tanya Brown made a long OMS burn that took the shuttle up to a 558-mile-high orbit. With one eye on the computer that gave her a constant update of the target, she used two coelliptic burns to shift to
Columbia
's track. “On the money, Tanya,” Grant said, clapping her crewmate on the shoulder. “Now let's catch those bastards.”

Grant took off her launch helmet, shaking out her short hair. “I'm going to go doff my LES and check the airlock,” Grant called over her shoulder, heading below.

Brown nodded and gripped the control stick. Rendezvous between two shuttles, each going five miles per second, required complete concentration to avoid disaster. The rendezvous was also complicated by the need for
Endeavour
to approach
Columbia
without being seen. Brown would have to work to keep the RCS jets aimed away from the target. For that she would use what was called a low-Z axis approach, a maneuver requiring the cant of the aft firing thrusters and the scarf of the forward firing thrusters to produce the needed accelerations. That would minimize plume impingement—meaning no one on board
Columbia
would see the burst of flames produced by
Endeavour
's thrusters—but it also meant burning a prodigious amount of propellant.

Six hours later
Endeavour
was starting to edge into range of
Columbia.
“There she is,” Brown said.

Grant, back in the commander's seat, saw
Columbia
with her external tank still attached. It looked like a big orange blimp floating in space. “Give me the stick, Tanya,” she said. For the final maneuver Grant intended to “eyeball” it, using the seat of her pants to put
Endeavour
into position. She was the best pilot in the astronaut corps. She didn't need a computer to tell her how to fly
Endeavour.
With a light touch on the stick she eased the shuttle closer, steadying three hundred yards beneath
Columbia.

A glint of sun reflecting off something large behind
Columbia
attracted Grant's attention. Puzzled, she investigated with binoculars, recognizing the distinctive conical shape of rocket nozzles. She swept back to
Columbia. What the hell?
The shuttle mains were gone and there appeared to be something else—another engine?—bolted in the shuttle's tail. Why would the hijackers tear their shuttle apart? Grant slowly lowered the binoculars. Something didn't add up. “What do you think?”

“Beats me, Ollie,” Brown answered, using the zoom on a small video camera for a better view. “Unless they need that new engine to go to a higher orbit. Could they be after a comm satellite in geo?”

Brown meant a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, 25,000 miles above the earth. Shuttles weren't able to go that high. Communications satellites were worth a lot of money, but Grant supposed there were better ways to make a buck than stealing a shuttle and rebuilding it in orbit just to steal a satellite. And who would you sell it to, anyway? “The only way to find out,” she said, “is to get
Columbia
back. Let's do it.” She unbuckled her straps and climbed out of her seat, heading for the middeck to prepare for her EVA.

Columbia

Jack, bone tired, opened the airlock hatch and pulled himself through it into the middeck. Even being weightless couldn't soothe muscles that felt as if they had been pulled into strings. He and Virgil had spent six hours pulling the remaining two engines out and replacing them with the Big Dog engine. Thank God, he reflected, that Virgil's SAS symptoms had diminished, at least enough to let him go outside and provide the brains and brawn needed to get the huge engines moved. Essentially, he and Jack had kicked the engines into space, wedging themselves between the aft bulkhead and the unbolted engines and using leg power to send them down their guide rails. There had been nothing elegant about the operation, just unbolting the engines and cutting their power and propellant lines. The original plan had envisioned a more careful approach so that someone might recover the engines, return them to earth to be used again. But the massive power-plants Jack and Virgil had sent tumbling away were just so much scrap metal now. Jack regretted that, but not enough to keep him from doing the damage.
Endeavour
was probably on her way already. They needed to get going and soon.

He looked up at the flight deck, listening. There was no sound of any movement there, just the faint clicking of solenoid valves as the air delivery system worked to stabilize pressure and keep the oxygen levels adequate. He floated silently onto the flight deck. He was in his underwear but guessed Penny was asleep. She was, strapped into the pilot's seat. Jack quietly checked her color. It looked good. He couldn't help but marvel once again at her face, the unblemished skin, high cheekbones, large eyes, and hawklike nose that gave her an exotic elegance. As he looked at her, her eyes blinked open and she stared at him sleepily. “Medaris, what are you looking at?” She yawned, a hand moving up to the back of her neck, underneath her hair.