Orbital Maneuvers (40 page)

Jerry looked at his watch with great anticipation as it displayed only two minutes and twenty seconds left.  He was about to lament the time again, but held his tongue as the open hatch above him caught his eye.  He looked around slowly and noticed that Paul was lying in his seat with his eyes closed, while Ivan was tinkering with his harness. 
The Russians are quiet for the moment.  Probably staring at the ceiling.  That’s all you can do in these damned reclined seats
, he thought.  The burning thought of being stranded on the station seared Jerry’s mind.  He was determined not to live that fate, especially if he had to be stranded here with Susan, the root of all their problems! 
Not this time
! he feverishly thought.

Susan entered the Habitation module, looked at the lockers that were built into the walls, ceiling and floor for storage and suddenly realized that she did not remember which one she had placed Jill’s things in.  She glanced at her watch and saw that she had about three minutes left.  With a wave of panic, she started opening lockers one after the other, all the while trying to recall what she did when she entered the module with Jill’s belongings.  She remembered that Ivan was with her.  Paul and the rest of the group were in the module talking, but she could not remember her actions at that moment.  With each successive locker she opened, only to discover that it did not contain the treasure she so dearly wanted, her sense of panic grew. 

Checking her watch she saw she only had fifty seconds before their departure window opened.  Cursing, Susan moved faster, as she finished checking all the lockers on the one wall and moved onto the next wall.  The lack of gravity further hindered her efforts, as she had to hold on with one hand while she opened the locker with the other. 
If only there was gravity, I could use both hands and open two at a time
, she thought.  The thought of abandoning the search was beginning to form in her mind, as she knew she was out of time without even looking at her watch.

Jerry slowly moved his hands down to the central buckle on his harness and very slowly, and carefully, released the latch, pressing it firmly against his stomach with hopes of muffling the mechanical click it would make when it released.  The buckle released with a pleasingly quiet pop, which was mostly drowned out in Jerry’s ears by the thumping of his own heart.  Jerry slowly pushed the harness out of his way and then checked to see what Paul and Ivan were doing.  Content that they were still preoccupied with their own distractions, he located the red launch button on the control panel and noted its position relative to the hatch.  Without a second thought of his actions or their consequences, Jerry pushed himself off the seat in one explosive move.  Grabbing the massive hatch, he pushed it into place with one smooth motion and slammed the release lever into the locked position! 

Paul opened his eyes at the sound of the commotion and was totally confused by what he saw.  He did not expect to see Jerry over him and it took a second or two to realize that he was pushing the hatch closed.  “What the hell are you doing?” He yelled at Jerry and struggled to release his harness.  Shouts in Russian joined in from the back of the CRV as Alexander and Nicholas realized that Jerry was loose.

Ivan also reacted to the sound of Jerry leaving his seat and by the time Jerry had closed the hatch Ivan was already free of his harness.  “Damn you, Jerry!  What are you—” he shouted, but before he could reach the hatch, Jerry had shoved past him and smashed his hand onto the launch button.  “NOOOO!” Ivan screamed in disbelief, as Jerry hit the button. 

The computer on the CRV obeyed the command that was given when it detected the launch button had been depressed.  It jumped to the new program that had been recently stored into its memory and without regard to its passengers, the station, or the CRV itself, applied full thrusters and released the docking mechanism. 

The engineer, who modified the code for them, at the last minute thought that they might be in a hurry to separate from the station and changed the thruster power setting from twenty-five to one hundred percent power.  The CRV shot away from the station quickly and violently, exposing those strapped in to a high g-load against their harnesses, but it was much worse for Ivan and Jerry who were not restrained.  The rapid push away from the station sent both of them crashing into the ceiling.  Both men were dazed by the impact and were not prepared for the next modification in the code that immediately rotated the CRV one hundred and eighty degrees and fired the braking engines at full thrust!  Ivan and Jerry collided with each other, their heads bearing the brunt of the impact.  Both unconscious astronauts were then thrown toward the back of the CRV and onto Alexander and Nicholas.

Susan’s hand was holding the door to the last empty locker on the second wall, which she had just finished searching, when she felt a slight vibration pass through door.  The sensation she felt seemed odd and unexpected, but she did not immediately process its possible implications, as she was preoccupied with the debate over checking one more locker or just giving up on finding Jill’s possessions.  An instant later, Susan felt a pressure wave spread throughout the station, the result of the airlock between the station and the CRV being left open when the CRV undocked.  The abrupt rush of air out of the station into the vacuum of space caused her ears to pop at the sudden pressure loss.  An alarm klaxon blared a warning, as the station’s computers detected the loss in pressure.  Within a fraction of a second, the computers isolated the source of the leak and immediately commanded the hatch to the CRV’s airlock to close. 

Susan froze for an instant.  The first thought that occurred to her was that some debris had hit the station, and the hull had been breached.  She snapped out of her daze, and forgetting Jill’s belongings, pushed herself out of the module toward the CRV.  Susan’s confusion returned as she narrowly stopped in time to avoid colliding with the closed hatch to the CRV’s airlock. 
That wasn’t closed before
, she thought, trying to block out the noise from the alarms and shake off her bewilderment.  She felt that everything was moving in slow motion, dream-like and unreal.

Susan looked around the compartment and noticed smoke in the air. 
No
, she thought,
not smoke.  It doesn’t smell…water vapor…from rapid decompression
!  Susan peered through the window on the hatch only to see an opening into space where the CRV once was.  She now knew why there was condensation in the compartment. 

Susan stared in disbelief at the black void where the CRV had been, then numbly pushed herself as fast as she could to the cupola, bumping into the walls as she went to get a view outside of the station.  She fully expected to see the CRV’s shattered remains shooting away from the station, thinking that some debris had hit the CRV itself.  In utter disbelief she saw the little ship floating away from the station, gracefully pivot and ignite its braking engines!  Susan reached out her trembling hand as if to catch the shrinking ship and in a hoarse whisper, all she could manage to say was, “Ivan…” as the ship disappeared from her view.

XXVI

In the CRV the chaos was beginning to settle as Paul managed to pull Jerry’s unconscious body off Alexander and secure him in his seat.  Little red balls of blood floated about the cabin from the wounds Jerry and Ivan had sustained on their faces and heads.  Alexander and Nicholas, struggling against the deceleration caused by the braking rockets, were able to push Ivan down to the empty seat between them and with Paul’s assistance, strap him in.  Paul grabbed the first-aid kit and tended to Jerry’s wounds, as he appeared to be bleeding more severely than Ivan.  “I think he broke his nose,” he said.  Checking Jerry’s eyes, Paul groaned, “Oh no, it looks like he may have a concussion, too!”

Alexander was tending to Ivan.  Upon Paul’s assessment of Jerry, he quickly checked Ivan’s eyes to see if they were dilated.  They weren’t dilated, but did not respond to the light as Alexander expected. 

Alexander shouted loudly to be heard over the noise generated by the braking rockets.  “Ivan does not look okay, and he has a cut and bruises on his head.” Taking the medical kit from Paul, he asked, “What happened?  Did Jerry initiate the launch?”

Paul could not restrain himself.  “Yes!  This stupid son-of-a-bitch launched us before Susan had a chance to get on board!” He realized that he was letting his anger get the best of him and offered an apology to the cosmonauts.  “I’m sorry.  There was no sense in this.  None, whatsoever!  Jerry had it in for Susan, and he finally got his chance.” He looked around the cabin for a viewport to see the station and then realized that there were none.  “Oh, God,” he said, “I hope she’ll be alright!” As a second thought, he asked, “Can we get her on the radio?”

Alexander and Nicholas looked at each other with blank stares and then to Paul who was shaking his head realizing what they were thinking. “I know nothing about this ship other than it’s used as a lifeboat,” he said.

Alexander asked Paul, “Are you not trained to fly this?” Before Paul could answer, Alexander looked down at Ivan and suddenly realized that with Ivan unconscious they had no one to fly the CRV. 

Paul shook his head.  “No. No way.  I don’t know much about it at all.” After a moment, he added, “This ship is supposed to fly itself, but with the program changes that were made, I think I would like to have someone up front to take over just in case.  I don’t really know if we even left within the departure window or not! I don’t know what implications that will have.” Turning to Nicholas, Paul asked, “You were with Ivan, did he talk about flying it back?”

“No, other than the controller, there, that was to be used to maneuver the CRV on landing if needed,” Nicholas said, pointing to the control stick by the left seat.  “If this ship had an airlock on it I would personally jettison this…this bastard from it!” Nicholas added bitterly, pointing toward Jerry.  The noise from the braking rockets suddenly stopped, catching them all by surprise and derailing Nicholas from his diatribe.  Nicholas quickly slid out of his harness, floated over to the left front seat and strapped himself in.  Scanning the control panel for a radio transmit button, he noticed the display showing a communication frequency.  “The display here shows a radio frequency, I guess that might be what we are transmitting at,” he said.  Looking over his shoulder toward Paul, he asked, “Do you know if the station is receiving at this frequency?”

Paul again shook his head.  “I don’t know.  Damn it!  I wish I had paid more attention to what Ivan was doing on the station.  I could be of more help now.”

Alexander, who was applying a compress to Ivan’s wound, shook his head.  “Paul, do not do this to yourself,” he said.  “You were busy, as were we all, trying our best to get us all back safely.  We each had a job—”

Nicholas interrupted. “I will try to transmit, but I am not sure if this is going to the station.” He searched the control panel again for the transmit key, but only found a button on the display that showed the word:
RADIO
. 

He pressed it and the screen changed to show the status of the radio, which was that it had passed its power-up checks and was functioning normally.  There was also a button that allowed him to change the transmit and receive frequencies.  Nicholas pressed these buttons and noticed that the display changed and immediately returned to the original frequency.  The computer was again following its new instructions and had set the radio to transmit and receive on the agreed upon frequency that the Australian Air Force had given Captain Greene.  The computer was not about to let anyone change that frequency. 

Not knowing if he was really transmitting to the station, or at all for that matter, Nicholas spoke awkwardly toward the speaker that was on the control panel.  “Susan, do you hear us?  This is Nicolas in the CRV, do you hear us?” They all waited but heard nothing coming from the speaker.  Nicholas repeated the call several times but to no avail. 

Suddenly, the CRV rotated another one hundred and eighty degrees, catching them all off guard.  They heard and felt the ship jettison the rocket pack, which was now empty and not needed for their descent.  It was rather unnerving to all of them to have the CRV act on its own, without giving a warning about what it was going to do.  As the little ship spun around, Alexander swore under his breath.

“I think we are about to deorbit,” Nicholas said looking at the display.  He had noticed that the nose of the CRV had elevated, so they could not see the atmosphere they were heading into.  This would allow the bottom of the ship, where the heat tiles were located, to bear the brunt of the fiery reentry.  Paul and Alexander checked that Jerry and Ivan were securely restrained and then checked their own harnesses.  Paul could use only his left hand to tend to Jerry, which made it difficult.  He noticed that the bleeding had slowed considerably and was hoping that the worst was over.  Paul pulled his harness a bit tighter and grabbed on to his seat with his white-knuckled right hand.

Their lifeboat began its insertion into the upper atmosphere at a much steeper angle than its designers had originally planned for.  The engineer that Captain Greene had found did this intentionally to make sure that the CRV would touch down in Australia, and not over-shoot into the southern Pacific Ocean.  Unfortunately, the engineer did not have the time to fully understand the implications of his modifications to the code that would allow this rapid decent.  The CRV would now run the risk of burning up from the higher temperatures that it would experience upon entering the denser layers of the atmosphere at a much faster speed than the designed reentry profile.  It would also be subjected to higher mechanical stresses on the airframe from the greater deceleration and buffeting it would experience passing through the thicker atmosphere.  If the CRV survived these extreme conditions, it would still face the problem of having the parafoil deploy at a much higher speed than it was designed to handle. 

The men on board knew nothing of the dangers that lay ahead.  They trusted the technology that placed them into orbit, just as they had no choice now but to trust the same technology to get them back down.  A lot would come down to whether or not the original designers of the CRV built in a large enough safety margin to cover the extreme stresses that the little ship was about to endure.

Deep in Cheyenne Mountain, a radar technician was monitoring the space station as it passed through the now reduced range of NORAD’s radar network.  She noticed a small blip separate from the station and tracked it as it moved farther from the space station.  Following her orders, she contacted Captain Greene and informed him of her observations.  After confirming that the bogie was indeed following the trajectory expected for the CRV, Captain Greene made a phone call to his contact at the airbase in Edinburgh, Australia, informing them that the CRV was deorbiting. 

Even before Captain Greene’s phone call to the base, aircrews were already in the air in support of the CRV’s return.  An hour before the first deorbit window opened, crews for one airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, and two C130 Hercules transports were already briefed on their mission and in the air.  The AWACS set up an orbit over the western edge of the Victoria Desert hoping to track the CRV as early as possible upon its approach to the continent, while the two C130s took up stations on either side of the predicted reentry zone further east to increase the chances of sighting the ship.  The C130s were flying in counter-rotating orbits, so that one plane would always be facing the direction of the incoming CRV.

These rugged, slow-flying, long-endurance aircraft were carrying an emergency medical team and necessary equipment to allow personnel to parachute into the CRV’s landing site, should it miss the designated landing zone, be it on land or in water.  If this were all to happen in daylight, they would have no trouble locating the huge parafoil that would stretch over one hundred and fifty feet from tip-to-tip with the CRV suspended below.  Unfortunately, it was about one o’clock in the morning in Australia.  They had another four hours before sunrise, and it was raining.

The job for the aircrews would be much more difficult.  They had to rely on the CRV’s homing beacon for radio tracking and strobe light for visual identification.  The latter would be useless with the heavy cloud cover over the south Pacific until the CRV cleared the lower layers at about eight thousand feet.  The radio beacon would help, and they would get radar information from the AWACS, but even so, it would be difficult to find the CRV. 

The lead C130, Alpha-Rescue One, was piloted by Squadron Leader Andrew Dunlop, in the left seat.  Flight Lieutenant Jasmine Ketchell—or Jazzy, as everyone called her—was acting copilot on the mission, and occupied the right seat in the cockpit. They were on the northern most orbit, while Alpha-Rescue Two established an orbit approximately fifty miles south of them.

The two Hercules transports had clawed their way through the dense cloud layer.  Bouncing with the turbulence, they proceeded to climb at maximum power to get above the clouds, which were topping out around twenty thousand. “I hope these astronauts are up for this ride on their way down,” Andrew said to Jazzy in between the thumps and bumps the storm was delving out to them and their aging transport.

“Yeah—” she said, as they hit a particularly violent updraft that pushed them all into their seats, rattling everything in the cockpit. “I don’t know what this is going to do to their parafoil, but it’s not going to be good.”

“Maybe we can warn them once they get through the radio blackout,” said Andrew.  “Give the base the low-down on this weather, so they can pass it on to the CRV, and see if they can clear us to a higher altitude.  Maybe we can get above this turbulence.” Andrew wrestled with the controls, trying to keep the airplane on course.  At this time, he was not being too particular on how tightly he kept his heading.  He was just glad that he was still making headway and that all four engines were still running at one hundred percent power.  He checked with the flight engineer on their condition and the status of the Hercules and was reassured that everything was running within specifications. 

Jazzy switched the radio over from the intercom to the base frequency to give the airbase an update on their position and the weather conditions.  Pulling off her headset to give her ears a rest and jotting down some data on the kneepad attached to her flight suit, she reported, “Edinburgh says they just got the latest update on the weather and they aren’t surprised at what we’re going through.  They also cleared us to twenty-five thousand,” she said.

“Well, it would have been damn nice if we had those updates before we took off,” Andrew snapped, pushing the throttles forward, trying to squeeze more power out of the engines and urging the plane to climb faster.

Ignoring Andrew’s outburst, Jazzy added, “They said they would pass the information on to the CRV crew as soon as they established contact.  Also, based on NORAD’s latest information, they have a new estimate of the location and rendezvous time with the CRV.” She tore the paper off the pad and handed it over her shoulder to Willie, the flight navigator, to calculate a new heading.  “Edinburgh thinks we should be seeing them in about twenty minutes, give or take,” she said.

“Well, we should be out of this mess in the next few minutes and things should settle down a bit,” Andrew said, a bit calmer this time.  “Check with Alpha-Rescue Two and get a status update on their condition.”

“Will do,” Jazzy replied, as she pulled her headset back on and switched the radio to the assigned frequency for inter-flight communications.

The navigator’s voice popped in over the headphones.  “Squadron Leader, we’ve got to come north a bit, heading two-eight-five.”

“Roger, two-eight-five,” Andrew said and slowly adjusted the plane’s heading, noting that the turbulence was already beginning to diminish as they climbed past twenty-three thousand feet.

The International Space Station rapidly left the little CRV behind as it decelerated to drop out of orbit.  The space station would pass over Australia long before the rescue vehicle would ever touch down, and by that time the station would be almost a half a world away.  Inside the sprawling station, its lone passenger floated in the cupola in a state of shock, oblivious to the alarm bells and flashing lights still active from the pressure loss. 

Despite the noise, Susan did not hear anything.  Although she continued to stare out the window at the black void, which was framed by the Earth’s atmosphere on one side and the bulkhead around the window on the other, she saw nothing.  Her hand was outstretched, reaching for the CRV, but because there was no gravity to pull it down, and because she had no conscious thoughts to pull it back, there it remained.  As for thoughts, Susan’s mind only offered her white noise, like the snowy, hissing screen one finds on a TV channel when there is no station broadcasting.  The white noise blocked out everything: all thoughts that could hurt or frighten and even thoughts that might lead to a small sliver of happiness, but which could be shredded to pieces once reality returned.