Combat

One

The soft whirl of the Environmental Control and Life Support System broke the silence of space, the dead calm that Russian Mission Specialist Sergei Dudayev had grown to detest since his arrival at the International Space Station three months before. He knew he didn’t belong there, in the pressurized cylindrical modules that had been his entire world for what now seemed like an eternity. A place where “up” and “down” had no meaning, no significance. A state-of-the-art rat cage where humans worked, ate, and slept protected from outer space by layers of metal alloys and insulating compounds.

Outer space. Sergei frowned as he gazed out through the Habitation Module’s panoramic windowpanes at the light cloud coverage over southern Africa. The Earth looked peaceful, quiet, majestic.

At five-foot-four, the thirty-year-old Russian cosmonaut was a short man, particularly when standing next to his American or European colleagues. With a neatly trimmed beard, hollow cheeks, and charming smile, Sergei gave the impression of someone who found no pleasure in food. In his long, bony face, Sergei’s alert, rather feminine eyes had an Italian softness that made people feel at ease with him. Today, he was banking on his natural ability to make everyone inside the International Space Station feel comfortable in his presence.

Closing his eyes, he listened to the sound of his own breathing as he prepared himself mentally for what he had to do. He felt his heartbeat increasing, the adrenaline rush, the perspiration forming on his creased forehead.

He opened his eyes and stared at a perfectly round bead of sweat floating inches from his face. He placed his index finger and thumb around it and toyed with it for a few seconds before squashing it. The silent explosion projected hundreds of tiny liquid particles in an isotropic that slowly trended upward as they got sucked in by the airrevitalization-system extractors overhead.

The time had come. With Atlantis heading back down to Earth and the launch of the shuttle Endeavour at the cape being delayed by a week, the ISS’s regular crew of eight had been temporarily reduced to five, including himself.

The opportunity to take over the U.S. military’s GPATS module would never be so easy. The Global Protection Against Terrorist Strikes module was one of several modules that made up the current core of the station. But unlike its sister modules, which served either as living quarters or to run experiments and collect data, GPATS, the highly classified military payload of a shuttle flight a year ago, housed a prototype hydrogen fluoride chemical laser gun powered by an array of solar cells. Initially plagued with bugs, the laser had already proven itself useful six months ago, when a malfunctioning satellite had come dangerously close to colliding with the space station. The laser had managed to transfer enough energy to the satellite to deflect its trajectory, missing the station by a thousand feet. Since then, the Pentagon, in order to protect the station from space junk, had used two shuttle flights to haul a billion dollars’ worth of upgrades to increase its power and accuracy, making it capable of disabling enemy satellites as well as incoming nuclear warheads — its design objective during the Strategic Defense Initiative project over a decade ago. But GPATS also housed another weapon, deployed at the request of the United Nations Security Council: thirty BLU-85 warheads, each fitted with individual Earth reentry boosters. The BLU-85 was the largest nonnuclear warhead made by the United States, big brother of the venerable BLU-82 used during the Vietnam era to clear out large areas of forest for helicopter landing pads. The purpose of the BLU-85 aboard the ISS: a tactical, nonnuclear, firststrike antiterrorist-capability weapon that could be delivered with surgical precision anywhere on Earth within minutes. Each warhead provided the equivalent yield of fifteen thousand tons of TNT, or fifteen kilotons — small when compared to the two-hundred-kiloton warheads atop ICBMs, but large enough for its intended application. A single BLU-85 could level a military compound in a hostile nation, vaporize a terrorist training camp, discourage an advancing army, or destroy a cocaine plantation — all with the push of a button, and guided to its target by its own radar in shoot-and-forget mode. In procedures similar to the ones followed for decades by missile-silo crewmen, the weapons were kept in a state of readiness, their launching controlled by two crew members from the United States, the country that footed the entire GPATS bill. GPATS was the United Nations’ ultimate hammer against a rebellious nation or terrorist group, capable of delivering a quick and devastating blow without the large overhead of troop deployments or air strikes, or the political and moral problems associated with a nuclear strike.

And now I will use this weapon against the Russian butchers, thought Sergei, who had become aware of this secret payload during the last month of his training.

Sergei Viktor Dudayev was Russian by birth, but his heart belonged to the struggling people of Chechnya, the land where he’d spent most of his youth as the son of a military officer during the final decade of the Soviet Union. Growing up in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, had allowed the young Dudayev to develop strong bonds with the locals, some of whom were killed during the turbulent civil war period following the fall of the Soviet Union. This secret loyalty had remained very much alive inside Sergei Dudayev after he’d left that war-scarred land, abandoning his friends in their fight for independence. The fire continued to burn in his heart even after he had settled in Moscow and tried to start a new life; even as he himself climbed the military ladder of the Russian military, following in his father’s footsteps; even as his distinguished career eventually led him to the Russian space program.

Sergei reached into a Velcro-secured side pocket and extracted a small electric stun gun, capable of discharging a single twenty-thousand-volt shock, powerful enough to incapacitate an average man for thirty minutes. His people in Chechnya had managed to smuggle the tiny gun inside a Progress Russian cargo spaceship, which had arrived at the station just last week. Along with the gun came coded instructions from his Chechen contact in Moscow on the critical timing to take control of the station.

“Hey, Serg. You look pretty depressed today.” One of the American astronauts floated past him, patted Sergei on the back, and stopped in front of the food galley. The American was the current resident aboard the ISS from the United Nations Security Council. In addition to standard mission-specialist responsibilities, he was also chartered with the protection of the GPATS module. Ever since the UNSC deployed GPATS, a minimum of one crew member aboard the ISS possessed the training and the weapons to defend the military module.

Sergei didn’t respond, his eyes shifting from the American’s holstered stun gun to the back of his light blue flight overalls, identical to the ones Sergei wore, except that the muscular UNSC soldier filled his, while Sergei’s looked a size too big for his lanky frame.

The tall astronaut turned around, his hands fumbling with a brown pack of dehydrated peaches. His round face, pink and white, went well with his short hair. Curious brown eyes blinked at Sergei. “You okay, pal? You look sick. Have you been getting enough sleep?”

His heartbeat rocketing as he tried to hide the stun gun behind his back without looking suspicious. Sergei forced a smile, slightly closing his eyes as he nodded. “Yes, I am fine. Thank you.”

The bulky American shrugged, turning his attention back to his dried peaches.

Sergei Viktor Dudayev tightened the grip on the stun gun and gently pushed himself toward the food galley, arming the weapon and pressing its bare-wire ends against the soldier’s neck.

A light buzzing sound filled the Habitation Module as the pouch flew off, spilling its contents in a brownish cloud. The American jerked for a moment and went limp, his arms floating in front of his body.

First incapacitate, then kill.

Blocking out all emotions, Sergei choked his victim until breathing ceased. Then he felt for a pulse, finding none. Satisfied, he grabbed the dead man’s stun gun before pushing his body aside.

Adrenaline rocketing his heartbeat, Sergei stared toward the other end of the Habitation Module, where sleep compartments occupied both sides of the padded walls and the ceiling. A crewman slept in one of them. Another American, the station commander.

The Russian cosmonaut drifted toward him, coming to a rest in front of the compartment. The commander’s arms floated loosely to the sides as his head leaned slightly forward. The Velcro straps securing him against the padded board applied just enough pressure on his body to create the illusion of sleeping in a comfortable bed.

Sergei curled the hairy fingers of his right hand around the plastic case of the UNSC soldier’s stun gun, and without further thought, drove the hot end of the weapon into the side of the commander’s neck. The astronaut opened his eyes and stared at Sergei in surprise, before his eyes rolled to the back of his head and his arms jerked forward, almost as if trying to reach for his attacker. The motor reflex ended a moment later, and, again, Sergei strangled his incapacitated victim.

The Russian unzipped the front of the American’s suit and removed a key attached to a chain around his neck. The American also wore a small badge around his neck. Briefly eyeing the credit-card-size object, Sergei decided to come back to it later. Right then he needed both ISS master keys.

Sergei Dudayev floated to his first victim and retrieved a second key, before approaching the center of the module and eyeing the closedcircuit TV monitors of the operations workstation. There he verified that the remaining crew members, one British and one Japanese, were still inside the U.S. Laboratory Module, the forty-four-foot-long pressurized cylinder similar in shape and size to the Habitation Module. Satisfied, he inserted both keys on the top of the keyboard of the Multipurpose Application Console, linked to the electronic core of the ISS’s network. From here, Sergei had control of all onboard subsystems such as electrical power, thermal control, data management, communications, interface with ground control, and even full space station attitude control and orbit altitude.

Sergei Dudayev bypassed all manual overrides of the airrevitalization system and emergency hatch releases of the U.S. Laboratory Module. A few more strokes of the keys and he heard the alarms going off across the station as the computer system automatically isolated the laboratory from the rest of the station by closing and locking the hatches at both ends of the module.

His eyes drifted back to the flat-panel monitor, which now showed two astronauts frantically waving at the camera and reaching for the radio. Sergei turned the intercom system off. He didn’t care to hear their pleas, just as the world had refused to listen to the cry of his people as Russian forces raped his beloved Chechnya.

Visions of his explosive youth, of his slaughtered friends, of his hasty departure filled his mind as Sergei typed again. This time he overrode the air pressurization and revitalization control system of the station and began to bleed the air still trapped inside the Laboratory Module into space. The astronauts continued to wave and scream in front of the camera, but their struggle didn’t last long. Soon they began to breathe through their mouths. Their movements grew clumsier, erratic, until they went limp.

The Russian quietly followed the bodies floating in the monitor. His soul could hear their screams now, their shouts and pleas for mercy. All four astronauts had died without really knowing Sergei’s motive, without an explanation as to why their lives had to end so abruptly inside this man-made pocket of life traveling at thousands of miles per hour over a fragile Earth.

The two keys giving him access to all modules of the station, including GPATS, Sergei quickly typed the appropriate commands on the MPAC workstation, unlocking the latching mechanism that isolated GPATS from the rest of the station. Locking the MPAC system by removing both keys, Sergei used a single arm motion to propel his weightless body across the length of the Habitation Module, where a hatch connected that end of the module to Node One, also known as Unity, a pressurized cylinder fifteen feet in diameter and eighteen feet long sporting six hatches that served as docking ports for the other modules. A hatch connected to the U.S. Laboratory Module, another to the GPATS Module, and a third to the airlock, where the crew could suit up prior to EVAs, extravehicular activities, or space walks. The hatch immediately above Sergei led to a Russian-made Soyuz capsule to be used by the crew of the station to return to Earth in an emergency. Sergei planned to use the Soyuz Escape System (SES) to return to Earth after he had completed his mission.

A fifth hatch attached a cupola to Unity. Composed of eight large windows arranged in a circle over the node, the cupola provided the crew of the ISS with a 360-degree field of view in azimuth and complete hemispheric field of view in elevation of Earth. Part of the instrumentation aboard the cupola was the control system for the ISS robot arm, a larger and more versatile version of the venerable robot arm of the space-shuttle program. Unity’s sixth hatch was used to dock with visiting shuttles or Russian Progress supply ships. The other end of the U.S. Laboratory Module connected to Node Two, which led to additional modules on that side of the station, including the Columbus research module from Europe, and the Japanese experimental module.

Using the handholds built in along the padded walls lining Unity, Sergei directed himself into the GPATS Module. Placing his feet into the secure straps in front of the latched hatch, he applied nine pounds of pressure on the hatch actuator lock lever, turning it 180 degrees. The hatch opened to the contour of Unity’s inner wall. Sergei pulled it toward him about six inches, before pivoting it up and to the right side, exposing the crowded interior of the GPATS module.

Unlike the other modules, illuminated with soft white overheads, the interior of GPATS had a green glow designed to minimize eye fatigue during prolonged combat situations. Viewed from the inside, the module looked like a half cylinder. The side facing Earth was completely taken up by the BLU-85s, each stored in its own individual compartment and stacked ceiling high for the entire length of the module, leaving a three-foot-wide “walkway” between the wall of shelled warheads and the left side of the compartment. The forward section of the side of GPATS opposite the warheads consisted of two large computer consoles, each capable of launching warheads if the order ever came from the United Nations Security Council. The workstation closest to the hatch had a red light above it, meaning it was the system currently designated as active. The other system, set in standby mode, served as backup.

Farther down the left side Sergei saw the single computer system controlling the powerful GPATS laser, gimbal-mounted above the module. Gliding past gleaming instrumentation and displays, the Russian cosmonaut reached the laser system, whose operation he had had to learn before being qualified as mission specialist. ISS regulations dictated that every crew member aboard the ISS knew the operation of the laser in case of an emergency. The operation of the warheads, however, was limited to UNSC personnel, mostly American. In the event that a mission specialist like Sergei figured out how to operate the warhead-launching system, he would be incapable of doing so without the authorization codes, which were kept in a safe next to the workstation. Sergei had picked up bits and pieces of the launching procedure during a recent drill by eavesdropping on an intercom channel. If the order to launch ever came, the authorized crew would use their keys simultaneously to open the safe and extract the sealed envelopes containing the launch codes, which would then be compared with those received from Earth. If the codes matched, the order to launch one or more warheads would be executed. Such precautions were required given the fact that albeit nonnuclear, each warhead was capable of leveling downtown Washington, D.C. However, no authorization from the Pentagon or the United Nations was required to use the laser, particularly if there was a need to deflect or vaporize space junk in a collision course with the station. Its use in an emergency was at the sole discretion of the station commander.

Sitting behind the controls of the GPATS laser, Sergei activated the search-and-tracking radar, which, in conjunction with the tracking systems of three reflectors positioned in geosynchronous orbit 23,000 miles above the Earth, had the capability of detecting and tracking anything in orbit.

Sergei went to work, commanding the laser’s search-and-tracking system to scan the space along an east-to-west elliptical orbit of 274 kilometers in perigee and 150 kilometers in apogee with an inclination of 63.4 degrees — the orbit of Russia’s latest Cosmos surveillance satellite, currently Russia’s eyes over the border between Chechnya and Dagestan to the north. Sergei adjusted the system’s sensitivity to filter out objects smaller than ten feet in length. It took an additional minute before the search-and-tracking system came back with an object roughly the size of a school bus.

Sergei Viktor Dudayev smiled.

I see you.

His fingers moved almost automatically, selecting an energy setting, width of beam, and duration of event. Giving the controls one last inspection, he commanded the laser to fire.

The hydrogen-fluoride chemical laser gun, receiving its power from massive solar-rechargeable batteries, created a high-energy beam of light, which streaked across space to one of three reflective mirrors in geosynchronous orbit. The fifty-foot-diameter segmented mirror, actively cooled by a steady flow of liquid hydrogen running below its reflective surface, and whose angle had already been determined by its radio link with GPATS, deflected the beam with only a four percent loss in energy. The beam continued on its new trajectory, which abruptly ended when it came in contact with the laminated twenty-four-karat gold skin of the Cosmos orbital reconnaissance satellite.

Although the beam only remained in contact with the satellite for a few seconds, the laser’s energy changed into intense heat, slicing through the skin, evaporating the metal, and instantly frying the sophisticated electronics housed in its core.

Before manning the workstation controlling the warheads, Sergei used the keys to extract the launching codes from the safe next to the system. He activated the system and spent a few minutes typing the thirty-characters-long codes, working through several menus and levels of security. Another set of codes allowed him to move down the encrypted system until he reached the directory where the launching software resided. A few more keystrokes and the twenty-one-inch Sony color monitor displayed a list of warheads, labeled UNSC15KTSN001 through UNSC15KTSN030 in cyan on a black background.

He placed an index finger, trembling from excitement, over a springtensioned trackball — a mouse didn’t work well in zero gravity — bringing the cursor to the BLU-85 warhead SN#001. Sergei’s plan, which he had secretly worked out two weeks prior to his launch with Nikolai Naskalhov, an aide to the president of Chechnya, was simple: gain control of the warheads as a hammer against the Russian troops threatening to invade Chechnya. The destruction of the Russian satellite had been Sergei’s message to Moscow that the people of Chechnya now had an ally high above the clouds. As he gained control of GPATS, another message was being delivered to the Kremlin: unless the Russian 157th armored division retreated from the border with Chechnya, he would release a warhead over an undisclosed location. More demands would follow.

The adrenaline rush making it difficult to swallow, Sergei clicked the button beneath the trackball. He wanted to activate the warheads and have them ready for launch at a moment’s notice.

The UNSC15KTSN001 warhead turned magenta, and a message appeared:

A slot opened beneath the monitor and a red LED began to blink next to it.

Sergei froze.

Insert Valid United Nations Security Council access card?

Why would he need one when he had already logged into the system and entered all the authorization codes successfully?

Confused, Sergei glanced at the screen again. It now read:

And a second later,

The Russian’s soft eyes widened in fear when he realized the system would not let him start the launch sequence unless he inserted a UNSC access card in the slot within the next fifty-four seconds. The UNSC had added a safety feature that he didn’t know existed, and if the system was as secured as he expected it to be, he would probably only get one chance at inserting the card before the computers would lock him out.

But where do I—

You idiot! The station commander! The card! He glanced at the screen once more.

Sergei jumped off the chair and propelled himself to the entrance of the GPATS module, floated across Unity, and into the Habitation Module. Shoving aside the American floating next to the galley, he reached the end of the long, cylindrical compartment, halting his momentum by holding on to the edge of the sleeping compartment.

He tugged at the chain around the neck of the dead station commander, but it didn’t give. Beads of sweat lifting off his forehead, the Russian raised the chain over his victim’s head. Holding the electronic card in his left hand, he kicked his legs against the side of the sleeping compartment, propelling himself back toward Unity. He miscalculated his zero-G flight, crashing his right shoulder against the edge of the passageway. The impact deflected his forward momentum, sending him floating out of control inside Unity.

Wasting precious seconds, ignoring the pain, Sergei clawed at anything within reach to regain control, grabbing on to a built-in handle next to the hatch connecting Unity to the cupola. In the process, he let go of the card, which floated toward his feet.

In one swift motion, Sergei snagged the chain, pulling the card to his chest. Kicking his legs against the cupola’s control panel, he shot himself through the D-shaped entry of the GPATS module, reaching the workstation a moment later.

Procedure violation! He had missed the window by six seconds!

Sergei tried to insert the badge, but the slot was already closed. He tried to type a command to reset the system manually, but the system would not respond. The keyboard was locked. He tried the power switch on the side of the machine, but it did not have any effect. The system was obviously designed to bypass all exterior input after such violation, and it would remain like that for 168 hours — one week — before it would let him try again.

Sergei was familiar with procedure violations, and the only way to reset the system before the stated time was by entering a special access code known only by four people in the world: The U.S. President, the Russian President, the British Prime Minister, and the Secretary General of the United Nations. The procedure was implemented as a safety measure against exactly this type of intrusion. One week was usually enough time to get either a shuttle or a Russian Soyuz packed with armed United Nations forces up here. During his last six months of training at Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Sergei had seen a platoon of UN Security Forces in similar zero-G training exercises. While Sergei trained to use a screwdriver in space, the soldiers practice zero-G warfare tactics. But fortunately for Sergei, he still had a chance of pulling this off. It just would take a little more time and a hell of a lot more nerve.

Moving up the module to the laser station, Sergei quickly verified his access to the laser. Unlike the warheads, the laser system could never be locked — as long as the user had the right authorization codes. Otherwise, the station ran the risk of getting damaged by space junk. He moved over to the backup warhead-deployment workstation, next to the one he had locked.

Sergei tried his luck at gaining access to the warheads’ directory. He got the message:

Frowning at his own stupidity, but grateful that at least he could defend himself and prevent anyone from getting near the station, Sergei deactivated the system and floated back to the Habitation Module, where he prepared a coded message that he sent to a mobile tracking station in Chechnya ten minutes later, when the International Space Station flew over the Caucasus Mountains.

The reply from his controller was very clear: hold your ground. Regain control of the warheads and advise when Sergei was in a position to launch. He would be provided with a priority list of targets at a later time. Right then control of the ISS played a significant role in the ongoing discussions with Russia, providing Chechnya with bargaining leverage against the Russian armored divisions gathered at its border. He was also told that the hearts of the Chechen people were with him at this time.

Afterward, Sergei dragged the bodies of the four astronauts across Unity and into the hyperbaric airlock, which provided an effective and safe mean for the transfer of crew and equipment between pressurized and unpressurized zones.

He gave the interior of the compartment a visual check to verify that all airlock equipment — including the two AMEX AX-5 EVA hard suits and all power tools — were safely secured, before floating back up into Unity. Closing the hatch, he used the small control panel next to the hatch to depressurize the airlock from the normal atmosphere inside the station of 14.7 pounds per square inch (PSI) to 0.5 PSI. As Sergei remotely opened the airlock’s exterior hatch, the pressure differential between the vacuum of space and the low pressure of the airlock sucked the four astronauts out of the airlock and into free space.

Sergei closed the exterior hatch, repressurized the airlock, and headed back to the Habitation Module. Although he felt partially victorious for coming so close to accomplishing his lifelong goal of seeking revenge against the enemies of Chechnya, the cosmonaut couldn’t help a wave of guilt. After all, this had been the very first time that he had taken another human life. As much as his mind tried to justify his actions, the plain fact remained unchanged. He had killed four innocent astronauts — people that he knew well after training together for over two years.

Sergei stared at his brown eyes in the small mirror by the module’s personal hygiene station. There is no turning back now.

Closing his eyes, Sergei saw Nikolai Naskalhov’s round face. He remembered Nikolai as he told Sergei of the pain inflicted on the Chechen people by the Russians. The rapes, the killings, the abuses, the humiliation, the agony his people had endured for so long while the Americans stood by, while the rest of the world stood by. But Sergei also remembered the feeling of retribution that radiated from Nikolai’s burning stare. The presidential aide had suffered as much as many Chechens but was willing to sacrifice everything to strike back, to stand up for his people.

Filling his lungs with the purified air of the Habitation Module, Sergei Viktor Dudayev watched his reflection in silence.

Two

Wearing one-piece blue coveralls, Mission Commander Diane Williams sat in the rear of one of three firing rooms on the third floor of the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center (LCC), a four-story building located south of the Vehicle Assembly Building, where shuttles were mated to External Tanks and to Solid Rocket Boosters prior to their rollout to Launch Complex 39.

Running a hand though her short, brown hair, the forty-five-year-old astronaut of three previous shuttle flights watched the start of her flight’s countdown, initiated with a Call to Stations at T minus twenty-four hours. The retired Marine aviator crossed her arms, which looked as thin as they had been when she was in the military, but without the firmness of daily exercise.

She watched LCC technicians run orbiter checkouts from their workstations by using complex algorithms that monitored and recorded the prelaunch performance of all electrical and mechanical systems and subsystems aboard Endeavour. The workstations, linked to the large-scale Honeywell computers one floor below, sent an array of commands to thousands of sensors inside the orbiter. The sensors measured specific parameters and relayed the information back to the workstations for comparison against safety limits stored in the Honeywell’s memory banks. The cycle of information and checks would continue nonstop until seconds after liftoff, when control of the mission would be handed off to Mission Control in Houston, Texas.

“What do you think of our new passengers, Diane?” asked Gary McGregor, the thirty-seven-year-old astronaut of one previous shuttle flight scheduled to be Diane’s Mission Pilot. McGregor, a former Air Force captain and F-16 pilot, was a short man, almost four inches shorter than Diane’s five-ten, with black hair, a carefully clipped mustache, and brown eyes that widened as he grimaced, something McGregor had been doing a lot since the change in mission plans two days before.

Diane glanced at the four “Space Marines,” the term adopted by astronauts when referring to the selected team of UN Security Council forces trained to operate in zero gravity.

“Look like your average tough hombres,” Diane replied with a shrug, her slim brows rising a trifle. “I hope they can handle it up there.”

McGregor nodded.

The four soldiers, wearing all-black uniforms, stood roughly thirty feet to Diane’s left. Their eyes were trained on a sixty-inch projection screen on the left wall of the firing room, displaying a Titan-IV rocket slowly lifting off Pad 40. The Titan carried a large segmented mirror left over from the Strategic Defense Initiative days. Diane’s first priority after reaching orbit would be to chase and rendezvous with the Titan’s payload and connect the large mirror to the end of two Remote Manipulator System arms — the fifty-foot-long shuttle robotic arm used to deploy satellites — to protect Endeavour from a potential laser discharge by the Russian terrorist aboard the ISS.

Timing was of the essence to complete the mission successfully, before the Russian regained control of the warheads. Diane had to deploy the mirror before the terrorist realized that Endeavour had been launched, and he used the laser to destroy the shuttle just as he had the Russian Cosmos satellite. There was a risk of detection, but NASA had minimized it by programming the mission software aboard Endeavour to achieve an orbit 180 degrees out of phase with the space station, meaning that the orbiter and the station would be on the same circular orbit, but at opposite ends, with the Earth in between, until Endeavour was properly shielded. In addition, to prevent the terrorist from destroying any other satellites, NASA, in conjunction with the Department of Defense, had disabled the mirrors in geosynchronous orbit, and also the Brilliant Eyes search-and-tracking satellites used by the laser’s tracking system to zero in on a target. The laser’s range of operations had been reduced to detecting and engaging objects within the station’s visual horizon.

The UNSC had also considered firing Anti-Satellite (ANSAT) missiles at the ISS to distract the terrorist while Endeavour dropped off the Space Marines. That approach, however, carried the risk of a missile slipping through and destroying the station. The ANSAT option then became a last resort if the shuttle mission failed to prevent the terrorist from gaining access to the warheads.

But by the time we get that close, the mirror will protect the shuttle, she thought, as the Titan broke through the sound barrier and continued its ascent undisturbed.

Diane glanced back at McGregor, who for the past day had began to show signs of stress. “You okay?” she asked.

The native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, brushed a finger over his mustache as his eyes stared in the distance. “I’ll be fine.”

Diane tilted her head toward the UNSC soldiers. “We just have to get those guys close enough to the station. The rest is up to them. Pretty straightforward.”

McGregor didn’t respond right away. The current mission plan, after attaching the mirror to the robot arms, called for Diane and McGregor to pilot the shuttle to a concentric orbit six miles above the ISS during the night portion of the orbit, when the station’s large solar panels were idle and the laser system drew its power from its backup batteries. The terrorist would probably detect the incoming shuttle and most likely blast away with the laser against the shielded orbiter until it ran out of power. Afterward the UNSC soldiers would use a prototype Lockheed boarding vehicle, currently being loaded into Endeavour’s payload bay, to reach the hyperbaric airlock of the ISS, neutralize the terrorist, and regain control of the station. It was a simple plan, but the Marine in Diane knew that military missions didn’t always go as planned. And McGregor knew it too.

Fortunately for everyone, the Lockheed boarding vehicle, a topsecret Air Force project that was being readied for space at the processing facilities of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), was scheduled for launch in six weeks aboard Atlantis. Now CCAFS personnel were working in conjunction with the Launch Complex 39A team to swap payloads. Endeavour’s original payload, two commercial satellites and one Department of Defense (DOD) satellite, had already been loaded back into its payload canister and returned to the Vertical Processing Facility. CCAFS personnel now transferred their secret cargo from the payload canister to Endeavour’s payload bay. The operation was scheduled for completion in another two hours.

McGregor shook his head. “I’m Air Force, Diane. I know how these last-minute missions usually go …” He lowered his voice a few decibels. “I mean, we had no dry runs here. No simulation time on this type of approach. We’re banking everything on being able to connect that damned mirror to the RMS arms, and also on being able to control the arms and the shuttle attitude verniers to keep that mirror shielding us. What if something goes wrong? Do you know what that laser can do to the orbiter? And how about that classified Lockheed vehicle we’re carrying? Do you know how to use it? And what’s that special cargo labeled UNSC CLASSIFIED in the lockers of the crew compartment? Do you know?”

Diane shook her head slightly while giving McGregor a slanted glance, pushing out her lower lip in a resigning pout.

“Neither do I.”

“That’s not our concern, Gary. We’ve been given a mission. Those guys have theirs. Period. You served in the military, didn’t you? What we’re doing’s called following orders.”

McGregor frowned. “How do you manage to keep it all straight in your head?”

Diane shrugged and looked away. Her mind had already formulated the answer: California. Many years ago. During a training exercise outside the Marines’ El Toro Air Station, her F/A-18D Hornet had flamed out, sending her jet into an uncontrollable spin. She had managed to eject in time but injured her back when a gust of wind swung her parachute into the side of a hill.

Diane closed her eyes. She remembered the base’s doctor, a petite woman with a heart-shaped face, a pointy nose, and enormous round black eyes wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope hanging from her neck. She introduced herself as Dr. Lisa Hottle, a physician assigned by the base’s commander to look after her. Dr. Hottle explained to Diane the crippling consequences of her spinal-cord injury and the possibility of walking again but only after undergoing extended physical therapy. The Marine aviator immediately withdrew into the tears. Life had dealt her a cruel hand. For the weeks that followed Diane fell into a state of depression. The Marine Corps sent a battalion of psychiatrists to help her cope with the drastic changes in her life, but nothing helped.

Late one evening, Dr. Hottle came into Diane’s room to check on her condition. Diane, barely acknowledging the doctor, gazed at the stars through the window next to the dresser. Instead of taking Diane’s pulse, Dr. Hottle simply stood at the foot of her bed staring at Diane. So, you’re feeling sorry for yourself? Dr. Hottle asked. Before Diane could reply, the petite doctor unbuttoned her blouse and reached behind her back, lowering her padded brassiere. The sobering revelation struck Diane with the force of a jet on afterburners as she stared at her breastless chest, a pink scar traversing Dr. Hottle’s upper chest from armpit to armpit from a double mastectomy. You simply go on, my dear Diane. You simply just … just fight with all you’ve got and go on with your life.

Diane had not only learned to walk again, but within six months of the accident she was back on a Hornet. A year later she had joined NASA and became a shuttle astronaut.

As the Titan rocket shot high above the clouds, Diane Williams let the memories fade. Although she considered this mission the most important of her life, that experience long ago had given her a new perspective in life.

Diane checked her watch. “Looks like the Titan is going to make orbit, and that means we’re going up, too. See you in a few.”

Diane headed toward the entrance of the firing room, walking by the Space Marines.

“All set, Commander?” asked the senior UNSC officer, a black ex-Army colonel by the name of Frank Ward, his booming voice matching his six-foot-three height and 240 pounds of solid muscle. Ward had been in a bad mood ever since NASA got news of the killings aboard the station. His man aboard the ISS had apparently failed to prevent the terrorist from gaining control of the station. The UNSC had come down hard on Ward, drilling him on every aspect of his operation, questioning his team’s capabilities to carry out the assignment for which the UNSC spent over twenty million dollars per year in equipment and training. Now Ward and his team were under extreme pressure to recover the station and save whatever was left of their reputation.

She grinned at the bald colonel with the powerful chest and equally strong arms and legs. A pair of piercing brown eyes stared back at Diane. “We’re ready, Colonel.”

“Are you certain? This mission is far too important.”

“We’re always ready, Colonel. Are you?”

Ward raised a brow and said, “We’ll be there.”

“Good. See you at the launchpad.”

Three

Fifteen minutes later, Diane peeked inside one of many windowless offices at the KSC’s headquarters. A medium-built man in his late forties sitting behind a desk typed on a computer. He wore a pair of dark slacks, a perfectly starched cotton white shirt, and a maroon tie. The keyboard clicking stopped, and he looked up above the edge of the brown monitor, studying Diane for a few seconds through rimless glasses. Narrow streaks of gray on his otherwise brown hair gave him a touch of elegance.

“May I help you?” he asked, returning his eyes to the screen. The clicking resumed.

Diane walked inside the ten-by-twelve office, closing and locking the door behind her. “As a matter of fact I need lots of help.”

He looked at her again, smiling. “Exactly what kind of help do you seek?”

Diane reached his desk and sat against the edge, her back now toward him. “Well, you see. I’m about to go on this long and dangerous journey, and I feel I need something else besides my training to help me make it through.”

He stood, walked around the desk, and stood in front of her. Standing almost six-foot and weighing 190 pounds, he removed his glasses and, tossing them over the desk, told Diane, “I’m sorry, miss, but I still don’t understand exactly what I can do to assist you on this journey.”

Diane pulled him toward her before throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the lips. A moment later she pulled away, staring into the eyes of Jake Cohen, and saying, “That’ll get me from liftoff to Solid Rocket Booster separation. After that I’m afraid I’m gonna run out of motivation.”

Jake smiled, taking her in with a greedy stare. He had always loved to play these little games. The businesslike, forty-eight-year-old veteran astronaut and now Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for the past dozen shuttle flights had a private side that never ceased to amaze Diane Williams. Not only was Jake Cohen a refreshing change in Diane’s otherwise very organized life, but Jake was also one of the very few men Diane had met who was never threatened by her profession. As a matter of fact, Jake once confessed to her that her brilliant mind and different past had attracted him to her just as much as her stunning looks.

“I heard the Titan launch went clean,” Jake said.

Diane nodded while brushing her lipstick off Jake’s face. He intercepted her index finger and sucked it gently. She pulled it away. “Pervert.”

“Can’t seem to control myself around you … speaking of which, most everyone’s out to lunch, and you did lock the door, didn’t you?”

She quickly pushed him away. “You’re nuts, Jake.”

“Hey,” he said, pulling her close. “You only live once.”

“Stop it, Jake. Besides, we got a briefing in twenty minutes.”

“That’s plenty of—”

“No.”

“It’s gonna be a long and lonely week.”

She smiled. “Are you really going to miss me?”

“Yep.”

“Liar. But thanks anyway,” she said with an odd little glance at Jake, who had always enjoyed spending time by himself. Diane sensed that Jake probably looked forward to just a little space for the next few days. Since their relationship had gone into high gear six months before, neither of them had done much outside of work besides rolling under the sheets at his or her place. As it turned out, both Diane and Jake had not had a sexual partner for some time. So when Jake’s hands had ventured inside Diane’s cotton skirt after going through a bottle of Chardonnay late one evening at his apartment during their seventh date in three weeks, Diane had not resisted, figuring Jake not only was the most understanding, decent, and honest man she had ever known, but he also had a similar technical background, which gave them a lot more in common.

Jake suddenly turned businesslike. “Are you okay about this flight? You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. I mean, there is a lot of risk on this one.”

Diane put a hand to his face and smiled. “And I love you too, darling.”

Jake grimaced. The issue of her going on this mission had come up in every conversation they’d had in the past two days, since NASA settled on a recovery strategy. Jake had volunteered to go in her place, and that comment had resulted in their first fight ending with Jake’s quick withdrawal of his suggestion plus a dozen roses. But as charming and intelligent as Jake Cohen was, he was also a hardheaded bastard who would not give up until Endeavour left the launchpad. Trouble was, Diane’s head was as thick as his.

“Jake, I don’t question your professional decisions, so, please, don’t question mine. Besides, you’ll be with me on the radio every step of the way.”

Jake regarded her with a peculiar grin, at once agreeable and frustrated. “You’re some strange piece of work, Diane Williams. But at least you’re my kind of strange.”

“I warned you about getting involved with me. I’m not an airhead in a bikini walking down Cocoa Beach.”

Jake laughed, “But you sure look great in one … or out of one.”

Diane slapped his shoulder.

“Say, speaking of strange, what do you think of your passengers?”

She shrugged. “We both have a mission, but up there I’m Mission Commander, meaning it is my pond and up to the point that he leaves the orbiter he will follow my orders. I think we understand each other. I am annoyed, however, that NASA won’t allow me to inspect the gear they’re bringing aboard my ship.”

“Look, you and I know that this mission is a bit different from what we’re used to flying. In the past at least we were told we were carrying classified cargo, and we were even given some level of detail about it, but absolute secrecy on this one is top priority directly from the top. I know it makes you and Gary mad as hell not knowing much about this new boarding vehicle or the stuff that they are hauling inside the crew module, but the reality of things is that you two don’t have a need to know. That’s Colonel Ward’s job. Think of him as a mission specialist. Your job is just to get him and his team close enough to the station and then get the hell out of the range of that laser as fast as possible, and stay out of sight until Ward and his men get the situation under control.”

“I’ll do my part, Jake. I was in the Marines. I know how to follow orders. When is your plane leaving for Houston?” she asked.

“In three hours. Do you want to grab a bite at the cafeteria?”

Diane Williams nodded and leaned forward, kissing him on the cheek before they walked side by side toward the door.

Four

The waiting never got any easier, decided Diane Williams as the digital display of Endeavour’s mission timer showed T minus three minutes. No matter how many times she’d done it before, sitting on top of enough chemicals to create a blast as powerful as the BLU-85 warheads aboard the GPATS module in the ISS made her question whether she had chosen the right career after leaving the Marine Corps.

But the reason why she felt even more concerned at that moment than on any of her previous flights was not the fact that Endeavour could become the target in an orbital shooting alley for the terrorist manning the GPATS laser. After all, Diane had been a Marine aviator. She had dodged more than her fair share of antiaircraft fire during the Gulf War. The woman in the astronaut knew there was another reason for her abnormally high heartbeat, for her dried mouth, for her sweaty palms. She had never before felt this nervous about a launch, not even during her first time, shortly after completing her astronaut training.

There was another reason, but it was one the astronaut in her refused to admit, for it made her feel weak in the eyes of her professional mind. For the first time since joining NASA Diane was truly afraid of dying. She had not realized her fear until she’d reached the Operations and Checkout building before dawn that morning to eat the classic steak and eggs breakfast, prior to suiting up and heading for the launchpad. The realization of the danger involved, not only in a routine orbiter flight, but in this particular mission had slowly begun to sink in with every bite she had taken of that medium-well sirloin steak and scrambled eggs. And the reason for the uncharacteristic fear was Jake Cohen. For the first time in her life Diane had fallen in love, and that gave her something that she feared losing.

Jake Cohen filled Diane’s life more than anyone or anything else, even flying. She never thought it could happen, but somewhere during the past six months her priorities in life had changed, and the possibility of a life with Jake had superseded all her other ambitions. Perhaps it was the fact that she was forty-five. Or maybe that the pilot in her had seen enough action to last forty-five lifetimes. Or the fact that Jake loved her the way she was. She wasn’t sure why it had happened, only that it had. And it had been a revelation she had kept all to herself, refusing to share it even with the man she loved. The fear of lowering her wall of pride and exposing her innermost feelings to Jake Cohen was just as intense as the fear that ran through her body at that moment, while her pale green eyes gazed at a dawning sky through the 1.3-inch-thick windowpane directly in front of her.

Breathing in the oxygen and nitrogen air mixture inside the flight deck while forcing her mind to put her fears aside, Diane checked the timer and gave Gary McGregor a thumbs-up. The Mission Pilot winked and returned the gesture.

The NASA Launch Room controller’s voice crackled through the orbiter’s speakers.

“T minus two minutes fifty-two seconds. Endeavour: the liquid oxygen valve on the External Tank has been closed and pressurization has begun.”

The colossal rust-colored External Tank, carrying over 1.3 million pounds of liquid oxygen and 227,641 pounds of liquid hydrogen, and measuring nearly 158 feet in length, began to pressurize the liquid oxygen housed inside its aluminum-monocoque-structured tank to a pressure of twenty-one pounds per square inch — the pressure necessary to force the oxidizer to the three Space Shuttle Main Engines and achieve combustion with the volatile liquid-hydrogen propellant.

“T minus two minutes fifteen seconds: the main engines have been gimbaled to their start position and the pressure on the liquid oxygen tank is at flight pressure. T minus two minutes and counting: the liquid oxygen vent valve has been closed and flight pressurization is under way.”

She glanced at CRT#1, one of three CRTs on the control panel between McGregor and her, displaying the status of the main engines. She also glanced at an array of warning lights between CRTs #2 and #3. Nothing seemed abnormal.

“Coming up on the one-minute point on the countdown, everything is going smoothly. The firing system for the ground suppression water is armed.”

Diane battled her rocketing heartbeat. Just like in the Marines, Diane. she told herself. Relax and do what you do best!

“T minus thirty-seven seconds and counting; switching control of the launch to the computer sequence.”

Launch countdown control switched from KSC’s Launch Processing System to Endeavour’s five General Purpose Computers, four working in parallel, the fifth checking the output from the other four.

“T minus twenty seconds: SRB hydraulic power unit started, the SRB nozzles have been moved to the start position. Coming up on fifteen. Switching to redundant start sequence. T minus twelve … eleven … ten … nine.”

Diane closed her eyes and visualized the sound-suppression water system nozzles popping up from the Mobile Launch Platform base, like lawn sprinklers, and beginning to spray water onto the base of the MLP at the rate of 900,000 gallons per minute in anticipation of main engine start.

“Seven … six … we’re going for main engine start!”

The GPCs ordered the opening of the liquid-hydrogen and liquid-oxygen feed valves of the huge External Tank, channeling both propellant and oxidizer to the Space Shuttle Main Engines through seventeen-inch-diameter feed lines, at the rate of 47,365 and 17,592 gallons per minute respectively. The highly cooled chemicals reached each of the SSMEs, where two sets of turbopumps boosted the chemicals to pressures of 6,500 PSI for the propellant and 7,400 PSI for the oxidizer. The chemicals reached the combustion chambers at fulminating speeds before exploding in a hypergolic reaction that created a colossal outburst of highly pressurized steam.

The soul-numbing rumble that followed reverberated through the entire orbiter as each of the three SSMEs, capable of unleashing 375,000 pounds of thrust, kicked into life at 120-millisecond intervals, and automatically throttled up to the ninety percent level.

“We’ve got main engine start … three … two!”

The GPCs verified that all three engines had maintained the required thrust level before firing the pyrotechnic device in each of the two Solid Rocket Boosters, and the resulting blast echoed through Diane’s soul as the astounding uproar of 7.5 million pounds of thrust thundered against the cushion of water above the Mobile Launch Platform. The acoustic shock wave pounded the ground on this warm and humid dawn as the brightness from Endeavour’s engines illuminated the indigo sky, casting a yellowish glow for miles around.

The GPCs verified proper SRB ignition and, a fraction of a second later, initiated the eight explosive hold-down bolts — twenty — eight inches long and 3.5 inches thick — anchoring the shuttle to the Mobile Launch Platform. All three SSMEs throttled up to 104 percent, and the computers started the mission timer. Diane sensed upward motion.

“Liftoff! We have achieved liftoff!”

The 4.5-million-pound shuttle rose vertically in attitude hold until the SRBs’ nozzles cleared the tower by forty feet.

“Houston, Endeavour. Starting roll maneuver,” commented Diane in a monotone and controlled voice, shoving away all of her fears.

Endeavour began a combined roll, pitch, and yaw maneuver to position it head down, with the wings leveled and aligned with the launchpad.

“Roll maneuver completed.”

“Endeavour, Houston. Got a visual from the ground. You’re looking good. Mark twenty seconds,” Jake Cohen said from JSC.

“Roger, Houston,” responded Diane.

Diane glanced at CRT#1, where an ascent-trajectory graph showed the desired ascent route and Endeavour’s current position as the GPCs issued millions of commands every second to the gimbal-mounted SSMEs and the SRBs to keep the orbiter on track. With this part of the mission totally automated, Diane and McGregor limited themselves to monitoring equipment and instruments as the shuttle rose higher and higher, leaving behind a billowing trail of steam and smoke.

“Houston, Endeavour. Mark thirty seconds. Throttling down for Max Q.”

“Roger, Endeavour. Throttling down.”

Endeavour’s main engines throttled down to reduce the aerodynamic stress on the 21,000 thermal protection tiles glued to the orbiter’s all-aluminum skin as the vehicle approached the speed of sound.

“Passed Max Q. Engines back up to 104 percent,” reported Diane, as ice broke off from the External Tank and crashed against the front windowpanes. Diane saw their minute explosions before they disintegrated and washed away in the slipstream. One point three Mach. They had gone supersonic.

“Houston, Endeavour. Mark one minute ten seconds,” reported McGregor. “Five nautical miles high, three nautical miles downrange, velocity reads at 2,300 feet per second.”

Diane’s eyes drifted to CRT#1. Right on track, she thought. The GPCs and their complex ascent phase algorithms performed beautifully. Right next to CRT#1 were the master alarm warning lights. All looked normal. Below it she saw the mission timer.

“Mark one minute twenty seconds, Houston,” Diane read out. “Nine nautical miles high, six nautical miles downrange. Three thousand feet per second. Mark one minute thirty-five seconds.”

“Roger, Endeavour. We copy you at one minute forty-five seconds. You are now negative seats. Repeat. Negative seats.”

“Roger, negative seats,” responded Diane as Endeavour soared above the maximum altitude for safe use of ejection seats.

Diane checked the chamber pressure of both Solid Rocket Boosters. It had dropped to 55 PSI down from 400 PSI at liftoff. At 50 PSI both SRBs automatically shut off and the GPCs’ SRB separation sequence software automatically fired the bolts holding the SRBs to the External Tank.

Diane watched the pyrotechnic display as Endeavour, still mated to the ET, rocketed at nearly five thousand feet per second while both SRBs arced down toward the Atlantic almost ten miles below.

“Endeavour, Houston. Confirm SRB sep.”

“Smooth, Houston. Very smooth,” responded Diane. “Mark two minutes twenty-five seconds.”

“Roger, Endeavour.”

Diane and McGregor monitored the readings from the CRTs for the next five minutes as Endeavour gathered speed and altitude while depleting the propellant and heavy oxidizer in the External Tank. This made the shuttle progressively lighter without a change in upward thrust, allowing Endeavour to accelerate to 24,000 feet per second — the speed necessary to break away from the Earth’s gravitational pull and achieve an orbital flight.

“Houston, Endeavour. Mark eight minutes twenty seconds, altitude sixty-three nautical miles, 645 nautical miles downrange. Standing by for MECO.”

“Roger. Endeavour.”

Diane watched the GPCs initiating the Main Engine Cut Off sequence. All three SSMEs shut off the moment the feed-line valves connected to the umbilical cords coming out of the External Tank were closed. Eighteen seconds later, the computers jettisoned the ET by firing the explosive bolts anchoring it to the orbiter. Suddenly engulfed by the silence of space, Diane watched the ET separating with a velocity of four feet per second. The tank would continue on a suborbital trajectory, which would take whatever survived the reentry breakup to an impact location in the Indian Ocean.

“Houston, Endeavour. We have ET sep,” said McGregor.

“Roger, Endeavour. Eight minutes fifty-eight seconds, confirmed External Tank separation.”

“Roger, Houston. Stand by for first OMS burn,” said Diane as she armed both Orbital Maneuvering System engines, vital to perform orbital insertion. With its current altitude of eighty nautical miles and inertial velocity of 24,300 feet per second, Endeavour flew a very unstable suborbital trajectory, which would bring the orbiter directly within the range of the ISS’s laser. In order to boost the orbiter to a safe orbit fast, one long OMS thrusting burn would be made instead of the usual two. The OMS engines consisted of two pods, one on each side of the upper aft fuselage on either side of Endeavour’s vertical stabilizer.

“OMS burn in five … four … three … two … one … now!”

In each OMS engine, highly pressurized helium forced both hydrazine propellant and liquid oxygen down to the reaction chamber at great speed. The chemicals clashed in a hyperbolic reaction, creating the necessary outburst of thrust. The temporary silence gave way to yet another roaring blast. Diane felt a mild pressure forcing her against her flight seat as the OMS engines, providing a combined thrust of twelve thousand pounds, began to accelerate Endeavour.

“Mark fifteen seconds, Houston. All systems nominal. Helium pressure’s 3700 PSI on both tanks. Propellant and oxidizer pressure looks good,” reported McGregor.

“We copy, Endeavour.”

Three minutes and twenty seconds later the OMS engines shut off, and Diane nodded approvingly. Orbital insertion had been as accurate as anyone could have hoped. Endeavour flew a stable orbit 180 degrees out of phase with the ISS, and on an intercept course with the Titan payload, which Endeavour would reach in another five hours.

“Good job, Endeavour.”

“Thanks.”

In reality, besides initiating the single OMS burn, her contribution to the mission had been next to none.

But that changes now, she reflected as she unstrapped her safety harness and watched McGregor do the same.

“What do you think so far?” she asked.

“Well,” he responded as they floated side by side behind the seats, “I just hope we can attach that mirror to the RMS arms.”

“One thing at a time.”

She removed her helmet, and her shoulder-length hair floated above her head. She wore a pair of small diamond earrings.

Diane used a single arm motion to push herself gently to the aft flight-deck station to open the payload bay doors and expose the vital heat radiators to space. The radiators, used by Endeavour’s environmental-control system, dissipated the heat generated by the orbiter’s equipment and also the heat accumulated on Endeavour’s skin during the ascent phase.

That accomplished, Diane dived through one of two interdeck hatches on the flight deck’s floor down to the crew compartment, where Colonel Frank Ward and his three warriors, dressed in matching all-black uniforms, had already unstrapped themselves from their seats and were going over a diagram of the space station.

Three of the lockers on the forward section of the crew module, opposite the airlock, were already open, exposing a number of black boxes marked with bright yellow codes.

Colonel Ward raised his head and briefly made eye contact with Diane Williams before motioning one of his men to close the lockers.

Since their brief chat at the firing room a couple of days before, the colonel had kept conversation with the former Marine colonel to a minimum, and that suited Diane just fine. The less interaction she had with him or his men, the happier she felt. Jake was right. All she had to do was get Ward and his team close to the ISS, and then move out until it was safe to return. The rest was up to them.

“Everything okay, Commander?” asked Ward.

“No problems, Colonel. You and your men made it fine?”

“Yes. Smooth ascent.”

“Good. I know you and your men are taking all the necessary precautions with your special payload, including whatever it is you have stored in those lockers. I’m sure you realize the danger involved if the air inside the crew module is contaminated. You do remember Apollo 7, right? The fire inside the capsule that incinerated three astronauts?”

Ward gave her a long stern look before saying, “All of my equipment was approved by NASA, Commander. Why don’t you stick to your job and I’ll stick to mine?”

“Fair enough,” she responded, as Ward lowered his gaze back to the large blueprint floating in between the four Space Marines. Diane checked her watch and looked over to McGregor making his way through a hatch from the flight deck. “Start prebreathing in two hours, Gary.”

McGregor also checked his watch before nodding. Prebreathing 100 percent oxygen was required prior to a space walk to remove nitrogen from his bloodstream. Inside the airlock, they breathed a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen at a pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch, the same as sea level. But once inside a space suit, McGregor would breathe pure oxygen at a reduced pressure of only four PSI — the pressure required by the Extravehicular Mobility Unit suit for ease of limb movement during EVA without excessive physical effort. The rapid drop in pressure around his body would cause bubbles of nitrogen to form and expand in his bloodstream, causing severe nausea, cramps, paralysis, and even death — the same problem faced by scuba divers when surfacing too quickly following a deep underwater session.

Diane headed for the changeout station to the right of the airlock, and, extending the privacy curtain, she changed out of her crash suit and into the blue coveralls standard for shuttle missions.

She floated back up to the flight deck. She wanted to run some tests on the RMS arms. Its proper functionality was paramount to the mission.

Five

The Flight Control Room was located on the third floor of the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Capsule Communicator (CapCom) Jake Cohen sat back on his swivel chair in the rear of the large room, where almost thirty flight controllers for this mission worked behind console computer displays arranged in rows of six or seven across the entire length of the room. A few projection screens on the front wall displayed different mission-related information, including a world chart that plotted Endeavour’s location in orbit and actual television pictures of activities inside and outside the shuttle, like the view of Earth on the screen to the right of the world chart, and a view of the payload bay on the screen to the left. Other displays showed critical data such as elapsed time after launch, or the time remaining before the next maneuver, which in Endeavour’s case was the time to rendezvous with the Titan target.

Jake removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and loosened his tie. So far, so good. Being CapCom was an important but quite stressful responsibility, particularly since he had to pretty much live inside Mission Control for the duration of the flight. But like his predecessors, going all the way back to the Mercury Program of the early sixties, Jake understood the significance of him being here. He was the primary voice that the crew aboard Endeavour heard after launch. He was their primary contact while the astronauts traveled in space at over twenty-four times the speed of sound. In his hands, and in the hands of the Flight Director (called Flight) sitting to Jake’s immediate right, rested the responsibility of making sound split-second decisions and passing them on to the crew in space in an emergency. CapComs and Flights have been doing basically the same thing for over forty years: assisting countless crews on countless spacecraft accomplish their missions and return home safely.

Since it opened for business on a 1,620-acre site twenty-five miles southeast of Houston in February of 1964, the responsibilities of the Johnson Space Center have included the design, development, and testing of spacecraft, the selection and training of astronauts, the planning and conducting of manned missions, and many other activities related to help man understand life in outer space. And it all started with the Mercury Program.

The Mercury Program. Jake couldn’t help a tiny smile. The term Capsule Communicator was a holdover from those early manned flights, when Mercury was called a capsule rather than a spacecraft. Those had been simpler times, when compared to current events, yet … look at what we have done with our accomplishments.

Jake felt disappointed that despite all the technical advancements and all the scientific breakthroughs, man was still man. And at that moment one madman was at the controls of the world’s most advanced — and most expensive — technological wonder, and the U.S. had sent an equally technological wonder to stop him before he wiped out the downtown area of every major capital in the world — according to a communiqué broadcast just hours ago from Grozny, Chechnya. Unless the United Nations — Russia in particular — agreed to a twenty-point list of demands from the Chechen president, including the acquisition of nuclear missiles to protect itself again future Russian threats, the terrorist would start releasing the GPATS deadly cargo one at a time according to a priority list of targets.

Jake could only pray that Colonel Ward’s team was indeed as good as he claimed, and that nothing went wrong with the orbiter. Clearly, there was no other way to regain control of the ISS than by force.

Six

From the aft mission station of the flight deck, Diane Williams guided one of two Remote Manipulator System arms from its stowed position on the main longeron of the starboard payload-bay upper wall to the large segmented mirror hovering thirty feet above the orbiter.

She looked through one of the two rear-facing windows at the fifty-foot-long mechanical arm, which had six joints designed to mimic the human arm. The RMS had shoulder yaw and pitch joints, an elbow pitch joint, and wrist pitch, yaw, and roll joints — all controlled by a joystick-type hand controller.

Slaved to Diane’s hand motions, the RMS slowly extended toward one side of the rectangular mirror, nearly as long as Endeavour and just as wide as the orbiter’s wingspan. Anchored to the end of the robot arm was Gary McGregor in his Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), an untethered pressurized suit that provided McGregor with a one hundred percent oxygen environment pressurized to three pounds per square inch (PSI), the equivalent atmospheric pressure of 14,000 feet in altitude.

They already almost had to scrub the mission because of the difficulties in retrieving the large segmented mirror from a malfunctioning Titan shroud. The procedure, which NASA had scheduled to take only four hours, had actually taken three times as long, requiring two separate space walks because the oxygen supply inside the EMU backpack only lasted eight hours. Using a battery-operated circular saw, McGregor had cut the faulty latching mechanism halfway through his second EVA, allowing the spring-loaded shroud to separate along its longitudinal axes, exposing the mirror, which then had to be unfolded before attempting to secure it to the ends of the two RMS arms.

This flight was the first time that NASA had loaded two RMS arms aboard a shuttle. Normally, only one robot arm was needed to accomplish most operations involving satellite deployment and retrievals, but this situation was quite different. Two arms were required in order to achieve a strong grip on the mirror, particularly during orbit transfer maneuvers, when Endeavour would use the Orbital Maneuvering System engines to change orbits and chase the space station. But loading a second RMS arm aboard the shuttle had come at the price of sacrificing the Ku-band antenna, normally used for communication and data transmissions at a much faster rate than the orbiter’s S-band antennas. This was a reasonable compromise to increasing the odds of keeping that mirror snuggled tight against the shuttle.

McGregor disengaged himself from the end of the RMS arm and grabbed a handle at the edge of the mirror.

“Tether yourself to the RMS, Gary,” she said when noticing that McGregor had not secured his EMU suit to the manipulator arm after disengaging from the RMS. If something went wrong at that moment, McGregor could be sent floating out of control away from the orbiter with nothing to hold him back.

“Okay,” he responded as he attached one end of a woven cable to the RMS while clipping the other to a metal ring on the side of his pressure suit. “All right, now bring the end up … nice and gently.”

The arm’s standard end was only about three feet from the edge of the mirror. Using the two-position slide switch on top of the rotational hand controller, Diane changed the sensitivity of the arm from coarse to vernier. The RMS motors moved now at a fraction of the speed they did before. Operating in this fine-adjusting mode, Diane positioned the end of the RMS within inches of a special fitting welded onto the aluminum-and-graphite frame supporting the segmented mirror.

“All right. How’s that?”

“Almost there. Bring it up just a dash.

Slowly, following McGregor’s hand signals, Diane brought the end of the arm in direct contact with the latching pin on the mirror, until the latch snapped in place.

Locking the arm, Diane Williams switched control of the Rotational Hand Controller to the second RMS, set the vernier/coarse switch back to coarse, and mimicked the position of the first RMS. This time she did it without the help of McGregor, who was still strapped to the first RMS and was currently engaged in clamping a high-resolution TV camera to the edge of the mirror to be able to see objects on the other side of the mirror.

One of the complications of having two manipulator arms on board was that Diane could only control one arm at a time. Although the wiring for a second hand controller existed, NASA had never installed it because it had never been needed, until now. But such installation would had taken weeks to complete — time the world did not have.

“All right, Gary. I think you can come in now.”

“On my way.”

McGregor returned to the payload bay by crawling back along the first RMS. When he reached the airlock he said, “I’m inside.”

“All right. Good job,” Diane responded as she commanded the second RMS to pull the mirror closer to Endeavour, leaving just a foot between the orbiter’s upper fuselage and the honeycomb frame supporting the mirror.

“How much clearance does that gives us?” said Colonel Frank Ward, who had been standing behind Diane for the past minute. The Lockheed boarding vehicle stored in the payload bay needed at least ten feet of clearance between the edge of the cargo bay wall and the mirror.

Without looking at the large black soldier, Diane said, “Not enough for your boarding vehicle. You tell me when you’re ready, and I will lift one side to let you out. Otherwise, I’m keeping that mirror as close as possible to the orbiter.”

“That’s fine,” Ward responded.

Diane felt bad enough that the vertical fin, the OMS pods, and a portion of the nose were not covered by the mirror. She didn’t want sections of the wings also exposed by moving the mirror around. The OMS pods and the nose had to be exposed since that was where Endeavour’ s attitude vernier rockets were located. Those rockets were critical for orbital maneuvering, and their exhaust paths could not be obstructed. But anything else was safely hidden behind the segmented mirror.

NASA had estimated the chances of the laser hitting the unprotected sections of the orbiter at less than three percent. And given the fact that she would just be dropping her load and then quickly getting out of the laser’s range, she would be exposed to that three percent for just over twenty minutes. To make matters even safer for the crew of Endeavour, the mission plan called for approaching the station during nighttime, when the gigantic solar panels of the station would be essentially off, and the only power available for the laser would have to come from the GPATS module’s vast array of storage batteries. According to the laser manufacturer, the batteries would only support somewhere around fifteen laser shots, depending on the energy level used and the duration of each event. After that, the Russian terrorist would be unable to fire the weapon until the station came back around into the daylight portion of the ninety-minute orbit. That gave Diane roughly forty-five minutes to make her approach, take the laser hits, drop the UNSCF soldiers and their gear, and get out of Dodge.

“How much time will we have to clear Endeavour once we’re in position?” asked Ward.

“About ten minutes.”

Ward nodded before turning around and propelling himself down one of the interdeck hatches.

Diane thought of Ward’s secret cargo stored in the lockers below, hoping it wasn’t anything flammable. An explosion inside the crew module would be bad news for everyone aboard. But she didn’t realistically expect NASA to approve the storage of any dangerous substance inside the crew’s living quarters.

Diane reached for the intercom. “Colonel?”

“Yes, Commander?”

“Please secure your gear in the crew compartment. We have a twenty-five-minute window to start our approach to the ISS. OMS burn in fifteen minutes.”

“No problem.”

“Gary? You’re through?” Diane asked.

“I’m getting rid of the EMU.” McGregor responded from inside the airlock.

“Get up here now.”

McGregor floated into the flight deck a few minutes later.

“Diane … I think we have a little problem down there,” he whispered, pointing to one of the hatches leading to the crew compartment below.

“Yes?”

Swallowing hard, McGregor said, “I got a chance to take a good look at what Ward’s been guarding so carefully.”

“And?”

“While I was changing inside the airlock, I saw them through the hatch’s window.”

“What is it, Gary?”

“HEP.”

“Wh — what?”

“And from the looks of it, those guys down there were inserting fuses into the plastic. I guess they were waiting until after we reached orbit to arm the explosives to avoid the strong vibrations during ascent.”

Putting a hand to her forehead, Diane Williams struggled to calm down. She couldn’t believe that someone would be insane enough to bring high-explosive plastic on-board a shuttle. And armed?

She rushed past McGregor and dived through one of the interdeck openings.

“Colonel!” she screamed, reaching the crew compartment and startling the four UNSC soldiers, who were setting up the seats in preparation for the orbital maneuvers to chase the station. Each soldier had an oxygen mask over his face. A plastic tube ran from each clear mask to a pint-size tank strapped to the belt of each uniform. The soldiers were prebreathing pure oxygen in preparation for their space walk.

Ward pulled down the mask. “I’m right here, Commander. There’s no reason to scream.”

“Who gave you permission to bring explosives aboard this orbiter?”

Ward gave her an odd little glance. “I thought we had an understanding here about our respective roles.”

“Not when it involves bringing HEP inside my shuttle.”

Ward exhaled slowly, obviously not happy that she had found out about the HEP, but still trying to see if he could reason with her. He put his arms in front of him, palms facing Diane while the other soldiers looked on with curiosity. “Look, nothing’s going to happen. We are profession—”

“I want to jettison the explosives immediately,” she said.

The UNSC colonel simply crossed his arms. “Can’t do that, Commander. The HEP’s a critical element of our mission. If we can’t regain control of the station before the terrorist regains access to the launching software, then my orders are to blow up the module. Besides, HEP doesn’t just blow on accident because of vibrations or anything else. It need to be detonated.”

“It wasn’t a request, Colonel. It was an order.”

“Sorry, Commander. That’s an unreasonable request. Besides, I only take orders from the Secretary General of the United Nations. This is the way the UNSC has approved to carry out the mission, and the White House has bought into it.”

“Do you realize what can happen if any of those charges go off inside the crew module?”

“Won’t happen.” Ward was beginning to show an edge. “The only time we were at risk was during ascent, and during that time I had the detonators removed from the charges. Now I need to get the charges ready for my mission. You’ve just told me I would only have ten minutes to get ready after reaching the ISS. That’s barely enough time to—”

“We’re not going anywhere until you lose those,” Diane said, pointing a thumb toward the lockers. “And that’s final.”

“You’re compromising my mission, Commander. I have permission from the UNSC to neutralize anyone who jeopardizes my team’s ability to achieve our objective.” Ward placed a hand on the stun gun strapped to his belt.

Diane tightened her fists and said, “And who’s going to fly this shuttle?”

“Your Mission Pilot.”

“He’s not going to do it.”

“Let’s ask him.”

Diane didn’t like the way this was headed. She was losing control. “I’m calling Houston.”

“Be my guest. But do it quickly, or we’re going to miss our window.”

Fuming, Diane headed back up to the flight deck, where a stone-faced McGregor stood by one of the interdeck openings.

“Jesus Christ, Diane. Let’s just do it. Let’s drop them off by the ISS and get the hell away from there until it’s safe to return.”

Reaching her seat, Diane put on her headgear and contacted Houston using the S-band frequency.

“Houston, Endeavour.”

“Endeavour, Houston. Go ahead,” came the voice of Jake Cohen.

“Houston, I’m afraid we have a problem. Colonel Ward has stored HEP inside the crew compartment. I want to jettison it. We can’t afford to have an explosion in here.”

“Ah … that’s a negative, Endeavour. The explosives are secured, and are a vital component of this mission. HEP is very safe unless purposefully detonated.”

“Houston, we’re talking about high-explosive plastic that could kill us all and destroy the orbiter. This goes totally against NASA policy. Remember Apollo 7? We can’t allow anything that volatile on board.”

“Sorry, Endeavour. The soldiers must keep the HEP. We don’t have a choice on this one. Their orders are to blast the GPATS module if they can’t get inside the station. Besides, the Apollo 7 incident happened because the capsule had a 100 oxygen environment. You don’t.”

“But they already have the fuses in and connected to the detonators. All it takes is one electric charge, and they’ll blow!”

“This one comes straight from the top. The HEP stays. And you better get everything secured or you’ll miss the window to reach the ISS in time.”

Diane inhaled deeply. This was a mistake. A terrible mistake. Closing her eyes, she briefly prayed that nothing went wrong with the approach. Although HEP had a long safety record and was very unlikely to go off accidentally, Diane didn’t want to add more risk to their mission. A subsystem could explode if the laser hit the wrong spot on the orbiter. Having explosives on board could create secondary explosions if the initial blast happened to be close to the charges.

“Endeavour, Houston, Confirm orders.”

Diane shook her head as she said, “I want it on the record that I disagree with the orders, but I will execute them. I will secure all objects in preparation for the OMS burn.”

“Roger, Houston out.”

Slowly, Diane turned around, only to be welcomed by Colonel Frank Ward wearing a headset. The plastic oxygen mask floated under his square chin. The UNSC colonel had been listening to the conversation. McGregor stood in the back, flanked by two of Ward’s men. The short F-16 pilot looked quite helpless next to the large and muscular soldiers in all-black uniforms.

“All set?” Ward asked.

Diane Williams nodded and turned back to her instruments. “We’re about to start an orbital-change maneuver. Everyone take your seats.”

Ward floated toward the back of the flight deck and disappeared through one of the interdeck hatches. The two soldiers followed him.

McGregor approached Diane as she strapped herself to her seat and put the headgear back on.

“Diane, are you—”

“Is the airlock secured, Gary?”

“Ye — yes. It’s secured.”

“Good. Strap in. We’ve got work to do.”

Diane refused to let her emotions surface more than they already had. She was a professional. She was Endeavour’s commander. She would behave as such for as long as the mission lasted.

Before starting the final approach to the ISS, Diane had to realign the Inertial Measurement Units — three all-attitude, four-gimbal, inertially stabilized platforms that provided critical inertial attitude and velocity data to Endeavour’s General Purpose Computers — to maintain an accurate estimate of orbiter position and velocity during the orbital flight.

She did a quick radio check inside the orbiter to make sure all was secured. Satisfied, she reached for an overhead panel and enabled the Star Tracker system. Talk-back lights on the same panel told her both Star Tracker doors just forward and to the left of the front windowpanes had fully opened, exposing the two sophisticated bright object sensors to the cosmos. In addition to the nose attitude-control rockets, the Star Tracker system was another reason why the segmented mirror could not cover the orbiter’s nose section.

The Star Tracker system measured the line-of-sight vectors to the two brightest stars within the system’s field of view. The data was fed to the GPCs, which calculated the orientation between the selected stars and Endeavour to define the orbiter’s attitude and relative velocity. A comparison between the calculated attitude and the attitude measured by the Inertial Measuring Unit provided Diane with the correction factor necessary to null the IMU error.

The newly adjusted position and velocity vectors, or “state” vectors, were then compared to the International Space Station’s state vectors fed to Endeavour’s GPCs via S-band telemetry communications relayed from Houston. Both sets of state vectors, updated once every millisecond as both Endeavour and the ISS orbited the Earth, were fed to the Guidance, Navigation, and Control software running in the GPCs, which in turn fired the Orbital Maneuvering System thrusters.

Diane’s eyes drifted to the OMS helium pressure and hydrazine propellant indicators as the engines came to life, unleashing twenty-six thousand pounds of thrust for fifteen seconds, directing a tail-first Endeavour toward its planned delivery orbit, nicknamed Delta. The mild deceleration force pressed her against the back of her flight seat as the southern portion of South America flashed across the top of the front windowpanes before disappearing behind the edge of the segmented mirror frame. In her mind, however, flashed the armed charges shifting inside their containers.

Focus!

A scan of control panel F7, where three five-inch-by-seven-inch green-on-green CRTs displayed the status of Endeavour’s vital systems, showed nominal. The array of talk-back indicator lights between CRT#1 and CRT#2, and directly above CRT#3 also showed no warnings. The OMS helium pressure indicator to the left of CRT#3 marked 3,700 pounds per square inch, matching the digital readouts on CRT#1 directly above.

“ETA to Delta Orbit, fifteen minutes,” said McGregor, typing a few commands on the right keypad of the center console beneath control panel F7, while checking the readouts of the rendezvous radar measurement, which provided range and range rate to the station. Unlike the late nineties rendezvous radar systems, which could not be used until the orbiter got within fifteen miles of the target, the new system gave them ranging information from as far away as nine hundred miles.

Diane barely acknowledged it, her eyes switching back and forth between the mission event timer and CRT#1. At Delta Orbit, Endeavour would have achieved the necessary translational velocity to maintain an orbit six miles behind the ISS.

The GPCs stopped the OMS engines. “Burn complete,” she said as the software programmed the aft and forward Reaction Control System verniers to turn the orbiter without disturbing its translational velocity, positioning the mirror toward the ISS. The moment the inertial system detected that the orbiter achieved the desired attitude, the GPCs fired the RCS thrusters in the opposite direction to counter the rotation.

She briefly glanced at McGregor before using a secured S-band radio frequency and speaking into her voice-activated headset. “Houston, Endeavour.”

“Go ahead, Endeavour.” She heard Jake’s voice coming through very clear. Audio and video communications, as well as telemetry-data transfer, were established through the S-band frequency. Information from Endeavour traveled to one of three Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) in geosynchronous orbit, where the signal was amplified and relayed to White Sands Tracking Station in New Mexico, before arriving in Houston. Although the link had been established nearly thirty years before, it still remained the best and most reliable way to establish clean, secured, and uninterrupted communications during a mission.

“Houston, OMS burn complete. ETA to Delta thirteen minutes, twenty seconds, over.”

“Endeavour, you’re confirmed.”

“Will be within firing range in one minute,” Diane said while checking the leftover pressure on the OMS helium and propellant tanks, which told her that Endeavour now had enough fuel left for two more orbital maneuvers besides the deorbit burn at the end of the mission.

Diane glanced at McGregor, who brushed his mustache with a finger while frowning slightly, obviously feeling as nervous about this whole ordeal as she did.

“We’re in range,” McGregor said, while releasing his restraining harness and heading to the aft station, where he could make adjustments to the RMS arms if necessary.

Diane turned around and gave McGregor a glance. The Mission Pilot already had planted himself in front of the aft station, his right hand on the RMS hand controller, which was currently set to control the starboard mechanical arm.

As the orbiter quickly reached its orbital position behind the ISS, Diane prayed that the mirror would hold in place and that the soldiers kept the HEP safe.

Seven

His feet secured to Velcro attachments in front of the crew support station of the Habitation Module, Sergei Viktor Dudayev heard the proximity alarms disturb the peaceful whir of the air-revitalization system inside the International Space Station.

He checked the timer on the support station before pulling free of his Velcro anchor and propelling himself across the twenty feet that separated him from the Unity module, which connected to the aft section of the cylindrical module.

His Chechen contacts had been right in assessing the Americans. They were sending a shuttle his way in an attempt to regain control of the station before Sergei could release any of the warheads.

But they do not know what kind of enemy they are facing.

Floating cleanly through the hatch connecting the Hab Module to Unity, Sergei kicked his legs against the padded wall to his right and cut left to snug his short frame through the opening leading to the GPATS module. The screen of the proximity radar, which filled the space three hundred miles around the station with energy, showed an approaching space vehicle. The computers had already identified it as the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

Eight

At Houston Space Center, Jake Cohen watched the image displayed on the huge projection screen in the front center of the Flight Control Room on the third floor of the Mission Control Center. The telescopic lens of the camera McGregor had attached to the starboard edge of the segmented mirror captured the image of the ISS in the distance. It looked like a white dot with multiple white lines extending like tentacles. The dot was the core of the station, where all the modules interconnected. The lines were the sections of the scaffoldlike booms supporting the gigantic solar panels. At this moment those panels were not powering the station because the Earth was now positioned between the ISS and the Sun.

Jake clenched his jaw and simply waited for the laser attack that he feared would follow soon.

Nine

“We’re here, Colonel. Stay in your seats until we’re safe,” Diane said over the intercom while still strapped to her seat. Her left hand was glued to the Rotational Hand Controller (RHC), the center stick located in between her legs, which controlled the attitude verniers on the nose and the OMS engine pods. By simply moving the RHC as she would an airplane control stick, vernier rockets in the nose and rear of the orbiter would fire to move Endeavour in the desired direction.

A backward glance and she saw McGregor still in front of the aft crew station, right hand on the RMS controller.

“We’re gathering our equipment,” Ward said over the intercom from below.

“No, no. Stay in your seats. Keep your equipment secured.”

“We can’t. There isn’t enough time.”

“But there is no telling how the orbiter is going to take the lase—”

A blinding flash, followed by a powerful jolt. The orbiter suddently went into uncontrollable gyrations.

Dear God!

“Keep that mirror taut against us, Gary!” Diane screamed, realizing a moment later that the laser had either partially struck the nose of the orbiter, or its energy level was far greater than Los Alamos had predicted. Endeavour’s nose was not only blackened, but a number of heat-protection tiles were missing while the rest appeared charred. The laser had damaged the nose’s rotational verniers. Two of them were firing sporadic bursts of—

A second laser flash engulfed the orbiter, this time without the direct protection of the mirror as Endeavour tumbled across space.

An explosion rocked the orbiter, followed by an even larger blast that sent powerful stress waves across the entire fuselage. Warning lights came alive on the control panel as a second explosion rocked the shuttle. The laser must have sliced through the exposed skin of the orbiter, damaging subsystems.

“Smoke! We’ve got smoke down there!” screamed McGregor from the aft crew station.

Diane turned around and watched black smoke coiling up from the crew module. The smell of cordite assaulted her nostrils.

“The HEP!” she screamed as her fears became reality. “A charge must have gone off!”

“Jesus, what are we going to—” said McGregor.

“Remain at your post!” she commanded, while her right hand applied forward and right pressure to the RHC to get Endeavour’s upper side facing the station again. The orbiter, however, would not respond, as the nose verniers continued to fire at random, making it impossible for her to offset their thrusts with the aft verniers.

“Colonel Ward? Colonel Ward? Do you copy?” she said over the intercom.

Nothing.

“Colonel? Colonel?”

No response.

“Let me go down there and check it out,” McGregor said.

“Remain at your post!”

The smoke was now beginning to fill the flight deck, but it was not as thick as it first looked. Most of it was already being sucked out by the air-revitalization subsystem, which was still operational after the explosions.

But smoke was the least of Diane’s problems. Endeavour was still dangerously exposed to the ISS, and she could not bring it back under control.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

“We’ve heard, Endeavour,” came Jake’s voice. “You’re showing multiple failures of the payload-bay door system, rotational verniers, and—”

“Houston, I’m having a hard time correcting the orbiter’s attitude,” Diane said, as she began to move her hand toward an overhead panel, where she planned to switch from General Purpose Computer control, to manual control of the Orbital Maneuvering System engines. But her hand never made it. Instead both arms got thrown forward from the fierce explosion that followed the intense light of a laser beam that caught Endeavour broadside.

In a blur, Diane saw a cloud of thermal-protection white tiles bursting off the orbiter’s starboard wing. Several crashed against the front and side windowpanes.

“The mirror is loose!” screamed McGregor.

Diane looked up, through the upper windowpanes, and instead of seeing the black supporting frame of the mirror, she saw stars.

“Where is it?” she asked.

“The starboard RMS has broken loose from the payload bay. The mirror’s off to the side! I still got ahold of it with the port RMS, but it’s no longer shielding us!”

“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled as the nose verniers ran out of fuel.

Black-and-white tiles, the Earth, and the stars flashing across her field of view, Diane glanced at the array of warning lights between CRT#1 and #2, and noticed the PAYLOAD CAUTION and the HYDROGEN PRESSURE warning lights on the red. At least the OMS engines and the aft RCS thrusters are still healthy, Diane thought as her left hand reached down for the Rotational Hand Controller. Now that she did not have to fight the damaged nose verniers, she had a chance to stabilize the orbiter before using the OMS engines. She could not attempt an orbital burn until the shuttle had achieved the proper attitude; otherwise, the burn would simply send Endeavour into even more uncontrollable gyrations.

“Get that mirror under control, Gary!”

“Working on it!”

Her hand applied forward right pressure to the RHC. This time the orbiter responded, but sluggishly because it was operating on only a partial set of rotational vernier engines.

“Houston, Houston, this is Endeavour. I’m bringing the orbiter under control. OMS burn in ten seconds. Eight … seven … five … three … now.” She threw the switch, expecting to feel the slight acceleration from the OMS engines.

Instead, a powerful explosion thrust Diane into her restraining harness. A side view of McGregor’s body flying past her and crashing against the front windowpanes brought images of dummies inside automobiles during crash tests. The explosion shook the entire vessel as the CRTs on the center control panel burst in a radial cloud of glass that reached Diane’s face before her own hands.

She screamed as razor-sharp glass rushed past her and crashed against the aft crew station of the flight deck.

Bouncing back on her flight seat as the orbiter went into another set of uncontrolled rotations, Diane forced herself to breathe between her teeth to avoid inhaling any glass particles or the floating beads of blood lifting off the multiple cuts on her face and neck. McGregor was out of sight, probably floating somewhere behind her.

Alarms blaring, Diane turned her head, only to see Gary McGregor choking on his own blood from a shard of glass embedded in his throat.

“No, no!” she screamed as their eyes met while she unstrapped her safety harness.

Diane reached him near the center of the flight deck, feeling utterly helpless as McGregor made guttural noises while small clouds of foam and blood left his slashed neck and were inhaled by his opened nostrils. He was drowning in front of her.

Slowly, she reached for the piece of glass and pulled it out, but the stream of spherical blood globules that spewed out of the wound nearly drowned her, forcing her to pull away with her hands on her face.

Holding her breath while waving away the floating blood, Diane refocused on McGregor’s eyes, but saw no life in them. She reached with her right hand to close them, but another flash, followed by a horrifying explosion, shoved her against the front windowpanes.

“Oh, God!” she mumbled as her head and right shoulder burned from the impact. Bouncing against the panes, Diane floated right past McGregor and toward the aft crew station, where she hit legs first before bouncing back to the front of the flight deck.

Disoriented from the multiple blows, Diane wildly tried to reach for anything to slow down her momentum and prevent another collision, which came a second later, against the back of her own flight seat.

The disciplined Marine inside her taking command, Diane wrapped both arms around the back of the flight seat and tried to take a peek at the control panel.

Warning lights filled control panel F7, where three rectangular holes showed the place where the CRTs had been a minute before. A look outside the windowpanes revealed nothing but a cloud of broken tiles and other debris she couldn’t make out. All she could figure was that the OMS engines had been damaged by the laser and blew up when she had tried to use them.

Finding it hard to breathe, Diane quickly reached for the lightweight headset floating over McGregor’s head. She disconnected it from McGregor’s portable leg unit, and plugged it in her own unit. Once more she hugged the back of the flight seat.

“Houston, Houston. Endeavour, here. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

“Houston, this is Endeavour. Do you—”

Another flash, followed by three explosions as the laser cut deeper into the orbiter, destroying its core. The blasts pressed her against the seat with a force so great that for a moment Diane felt she was pulling Gs in an F-18. She felt the sudden urge to vomit, and bending over, she did, coughing a large cloud of blood from a number of burst capillaries in her mouth and throat. Her eyes filled as she turned her face away from the floating blood moving toward the rear of the flight deck, where it mixed with the smoke still rising from the crew compartment below.

Another glance at the control panel told her of the lost cause she faced. All main systems were gone, including the air-revitalization system, which explained why she was having a hard time breathing. Then she saw the front windowpanes, saw the growing cracks streaking across the 1.3-inch-thick panes.

Diane knew what that meant, and without another thought, she kicked her legs against the back of the seat and pushed her bruised body toward the left interdeck hatch, just aft of her flight seat, where she curled her fingers on the side rails and pulled herself into the mid deck compartment. The smoke there was thicker than in the flight deck, but she could still see her way through the—

The sight almost made her vomit, but the Marine in her took over, forcing control as she stared at the mangled and charred body parts floating in—

Hurry.

She had no time to waste. The moment those panes gave, the vacuum pressure would be unbearable as everything loose got sucked through the openings. The sudden loss of pressure would mean instant death.

Her hands reached the airlock hatch actuator lock lever at the rear of the crew compartment, and she turned it 180 degrees to unlatch it, pulling the D-shaped hatch toward her. The massive door pivoted up and to the side, exposing the roomy interior of the airlock. Diane floated inside and closed and locked the hatch behind her just as another explosion shook the vessel, giving Diane the impression that the orbiter would come apart any minute. The blast shoved her against the opposite side of the airlock, where the back of her head struck one of the aluminum alloy handholds on the sides of the locked hatch that led to the payload bay.

In an instant, the madness around her ceased and Diane Williams lost consciousness.

Ten

Sergei Dudayev watched the wingless orbiter tumble away after he blasted it one last time before the battery level dropped below the fifty percent mark. He decided to stop firing to conserve power in case he needed it before the ISS could reach the daylight portion of its orbit and replenish the battery charge.

Sergei adjusted the resolution of the spotting telescope of the GPATS module. At such short distance it gave him a clear view of the broken front windowpanes, which meant that the flight deck and the crew compartment had lost pressurization. He also noticed a missing payload bay door, most of the wings and vertical fin, and nearly half of the thermal protection tiles. The shield, which Sergei assumed was made out of segmented mirrors since it had deflected the initial laser shot, now floated away from the orbiter with one of the RMS arms still attached to it. Farther away, he saw the missing payload door, now a rotating hunk of twisted, blackened aluminum.

Sergei glanced at Endeavour one last time and shook his head. Fools. Maybe now they will concede to my people’s demands.

He shifted his gaze to the locked workstation.

Soon, he thought. Soon the warheads will be mine.

Eleven

“Come in Endeavour, over. Endeavour come in, over.”

In the midst of a chaos inside the Flight Control Room, Jake Cohen waited for an answer, but all he got was the low hissing static noise coming from the overhead speakers.

“Sir,” said the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Systems Engineer (EECOM) to Jake’s far left, a blond-headed man of about thirty with fair skin and a wide nose, wearing black-framed glasses. EECOM was responsible for monitoring Endeavour’s fuel cells, avionics, cabin-cooling systems, electrical-distribution systems, and cabinpressure-control systems. “We’re still getting S-band telemetry from the orbiter through the TDRS-White Sands link, and it shows zero pressurization inside the crew compartment and flight deck. I’m afraid that—”

“Yes, I know,” Jake said, more to himself than to anyone. “Endeavour just got hit multiple times by that damned laser!”

Silence in the control room.

“GUIDO,” Jake said a moment later. “Status.”

The Guidance Officer, call sign GUIDO, sitting a row in front of Jake, was responsible for monitoring onboard navigation and guidance computer software.

While looking at the telemetry data browsing across his twenty-inch color screen, GUIDO said, “Orbiter tumbling along all three axes while maintaining a concentric orbit with the station roughly six miles away. Guidance computer software showing a major malfunction. I’m afraid we can’t control the orbiter via remote.”

Jake glanced to his right at the Propulsion Systems Engineer. “Talk to me, PROP.”

The fifty-year-old PROP, a veteran astronaut himself, was responsible for monitoring and evaluating the Reaction Control and the Orbital Maneuvering System engines. He also managed propellants. PROP kept his eyes on the data displayed in his console. “Doesn’t look good. Major malfunctions on the OMS engines. Looks like the laser cracked the propellant tanks and they blew the moment Commander Williams fired them.”

Damn. I can’t believe this has actually happened. And Diane, the crew … God Almighty.

And that Russian bastard is still at large.

Closing his eyes, Jake Cohen removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He looked to his left. The Flight Director had already left the room to brief the NASA Administrator, who in turn would pass the information to the President and his staff.

“Wait … wait,” said the blond-headed EECOM. “The computers are showing nominal pressure inside the airlock. Oxygen content is at thirty-two percent. Pressure is 14.7 PSI.” Slowly, he turned to Jake. “Do you think that—”

Jake snapped forward. “Damned right I do! I say we got us some astronauts marooned inside that airlock! What’s the status of the pressure-control system and oxygen supply?”

The EECOM’s fingers worked on the keyboard as data flashed off and on the screen. After several seconds, he said, “We’re in luck. Pressure system is active and still trying to repressurize the crew compartment. My guess is that we got a serious opening to space inside that compartment and the system can’t pressurize it. I’m showing two fuel cells down and one still operational.”

Jake nodded. “Redirect the pressure-control system to support only the airlock, nothing else. Disconnect all other systems that might be draining the fuel cell. Let’s focus everything we have on keeping the atmosphere inside that airlock within the normal range. That will buy us some time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Since the pressure-control system didn’t have to operate at full power because all it was pressurizing was the volume of air inside the airlock, the single fuel cell could last much longer. This was a significant advantage because the oxygen used by Endeavour’s life-support system was the same liquid oxygen used by the fuel cell, along with liquid hydrogen, in an electrochemical reaction to produce electricity. The longer the fuel cell lasted, the longer that airlock would be not only fully pressurized, but also filled with air.

“It’s done. At the current load, that fuel cell should last us about twenty-four hours, give or take a few, depending on how many astronauts are alive,” commented the EECOM.

Jake stared at the blank screen, where only a few minutes before he had seen the images captured by Endeavour’s video cameras. Now he was blind, trying to help a dying orbiter while operating in the dark. Well, almost in the dark, he admitted. At least partial telemetry data continued to pour in, giving his support crew the information they might need in order to figure a way out of this mess.

Interlacing the fingers of his hands in front of his face, Jake closed his eyes, praying that at least somebody had made it to the airlock. Based on the conversation aboard Endeavour before the attack, Jake felt that Diane and McGregor were the two with the best chance of being inside that airlock because they should have been up in the flight deck controlling the orbiter and the RMS arm at the time of the HEP blast inside the crew compartment below.

I should have listened to you, Diane.

Jake Cohen forced the guilt out of his mind. He needed his logical side operating at full capacity in order to guide his staff through this one. Every piece of telemetry data arriving into the Flight Control Room would have to be scrutinized by itself and in combination with other information to try to piece together a possible salvage operation of an orbiter that already appeared beyond salvage.

Twelve

Diane Williams pulled up so fast after releasing her Hornet’s ordnance that she thought the Gs would crush her. Her vision tunneled to the information projected on the F-18’s heads-up display. Diane kept the control column pulled back. The Hornet shot up into the overcast sky, its wings biting the air as it rolled above the clouds and the sun filled her cockpit, making her feel so detached from the world below. Flying gave her a sense of omnipotence she could get nowhere else. She belonged to a privileged class, an aviator of the United States Marines, pilot of one of the most coveted and feared war machines in the world: the Hornet. Her Hornet. And Diane pushed it, forced it to the outer limits of its design envelope, rammed it into the tightest turns that its titanium-layered honeycomb structure could take, shoved it across the sky in any imaginable way to accomplish the job. To fulfill her promise to America that she would put every single ounce of her life into doing what she had been trained to do.

But her engines suddenly flamed out. Lights filled her cockpit as her jet tumbled out of control, alarms blaring. But then the noise went away as fast as it had appeared, and Diane suddenly found herself lying in that hospital bed at El Toro Air Station. The room was dark, humid, quiet. The lamp on her nightstand filled the room with yellow light, but it was enough to illuminate the faces of the others present in that room. Diane saw Dr. Lisa Hottle’s face giving her a stern, yet compassionate look. Next to the doctor stood Gary McGregor in blue coveralls gazing at the floor, a large piece of glass embedded in his throat. Then Diane turned to the last person in the room, a large black man wearing a dark uniform. It was Colonel Frank Ward, his left hand holding an HEP charge. Then a blinding light filled the room, followed by a loud explosion and alarms, many alarms …

Another siren went off, but it didn’t belong inside the hospital room. Diane didn’t know where it had come from. The siren wasn’t part of the nightmare. The siren was here, inside the sealed airlock of the wounded orbiter. It was the alarm that NASA had installed in all shuttles to give crews a five minute warning before the oxygen supply would run out.

Dizzy and in severe pain, Diane kept her eyes closed. The throbbing on the back of her head challenged the piercing pain from her throat, where blood vessels had burst from the G-like pressure induced by the multiple explosions. The coppery taste of blood filled her senses with the same intensity as the general body soreness from bouncing around the flight deck like a rag doll.

Floating upside down, Diane opened her eyes, feeling what had to be the worst headache of her life. The relentless pounding of veins against her temples seemed amplified by the siren telling her she had less than five minutes’ worth of air inside that compartment, and from what she remembered she doubted Endeavour had any other pressurized compartment that could support life after the laser attack.

And McGregor, the UNSC soldiers …

Concentrate.

Turning off the alarm, she glanced through the four-inch-diameter observation window on the hatch leading to the payload bay, and visually checked the main cargo in Endeavour’s payload bay: the new and still untested Astronaut Maneuvering Vehicle — a four-person unpressurized prototype module designed by Lockheed to provide teams of UNSC personnel the flexibility of moving in space quickly and efficiently. The first production AMV was not supposed to be ready for another year, but the problems aboard the ISS called for Lockheed to release its only prototype.

“Shit,” Diane whispered when spotting the vehicle upside down and jammed against the rear of the bay. Actually, most everything else that she could see through the narrow opening appeared out of place or missing.

Before she could attempt an Extravehicular Activity to check the damage done to the AMV and the other equipment in the payload bay, Diane had to start the hourlong 100 percent pure-oxygen prebreathing.

After a brief check that the integral oxygen tank for prebreathing was not operational, Diane grabbed the emergency portable oxygen unit off a built-in inner wall to her left. She actually needed the portable unit even if she wasn’t planning an EVA because the oxygen level inside the airlock was falling below the safety level.

She placed the clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth and turned a red knob on the pint-size canister connected to the mask through a thin plastic tube. Letting the canister float overhead, Diane stripped naked. Next she opened a compartment containing most of the “underwear” garments she would have to put on prior to donning the actual EMU — the space suit designed to provided pressure, thermal and micrometeoroid protection, communications, and full environmental control support for one astronaut. The EMU’s thick skin consisted of a number of layers, starting with an inner layer of urethane-coated nylon, followed by a restraining layer of Dacron, a thermal layer of neoprene-coated nylon, five layers of aluminized Mylar laminated with Dacron scrim, and an outermost layer made of Goretex, Kevlar, and Nomex for micrometeoroid protection.

Diane put on the Urine Collection Device — a pouch capable of holding one quart of liquid, derived from a device used by people with malfunctioning kidneys. She followed that with the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) which, similar to long underwear, consisted of a one-piece front-zippered suit made of a stretch-nylon fabric but laced with over three hundred feet of plastic tubing, through which chilled water would flow to control her body temperature.

The undergarments out of the way, and while still breathing directly from the oxygen canister, Diane connected the LCVG’s electrical harness to the upper torso section of the multilayered EMU she retrieved from another airlock compartment. She removed the EVA checklist attached to the upper torso’s left sleeve and, having done her share of space walks, she gave it a quick scan before flinging it aside.

She attached the electrical harness to the EMU. Because the orbiter’s communications system was dead, the electrical harness — designed to provide her with a biomedical and communications link to Mission Control — would not work until she reached the space station.

Next, she grabbed the connecting waist ring of the lower torso section — or suit pants — of the EMU, and, while floating in the middle of the airlock, she guided both legs into it. The lower torso came with boots, and joints in the hip, knee, and ankle to give the astronaut maximum mobility. Briefly removing the oxygen mask while extending both arms straight up, Diane “dived” into the upper torso section floating overhead, reattached the oxygen mask, and connected the tubing from the EMU to the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment before joining and securing the upper and lower torso sections with the waist-entry closures of the connecting rings.

She checked her watch. According to NASA regulations, she had another forty minutes of prebreathing before she could go outside, but because the crippled orbiter could not provide her suit with cooling water, oxygen, and electrical power during the long prebreathing period to conserve the oxygen and battery power inside the EMU’s backpack for actual EVA time, Diane decided to risk a prebreathing shortcut to maximize the eight hours’ worth of oxygen of the Primary Life Support System (PLSS) backpack unit. Besides, her emergency oxygen canister would be exhausted in another five minutes and the air quality inside the airlock was already below the safe level.

Diane backed herself against one of two PLSS units and secured it in place. She made the appropriate connections for feedwater and oxygen, and secured the display and control module on the front, which showed alpha and numeric readouts of oxygen level, fuel, and power remaining in the PLSS.

She grabbed one of the helmets, a clear polycarbonate pressure bubble with a neck connecting ring, and rubbed an antifog compound on the inside of the helmet. Next she placed a communications cap on her head and connected it to the EMU electrical harness. Grabbing a pair of gloves and putting them on, she fastened the ends to the locking rings at the end of each EMU sleeve.

Taking a final breath of 100 percent oxygen from the portable unit, Diane removed the clear mask and let it float over head. Next, she lowered the helmet and locked it in place. Powering up the PLSS, she breathed again while pressurizing the suit to 16.7 PSI at 100 percent oxygen, two PSI above the airlock pressure, to create a pressure differential. Diane’s body responded with a slight discomfort in her ears and sinus cavities. She tried to compensate by yawning and swallowing, but the pressure in her ears remained. Pressing her nose against a small sponge mounted to her right, inside the helmet ring, Diane blew with her mouth closed, forcing air inside her ear cavities and equalizing the pressure.

Her eyes on the display module attached to her chest, she turned off the PLSS and waited one minute to check for suit leaks. The pressure dropped to 16.6 PSI, well within the maximum allowable rate of leakage of the shuttle EMU of 0.2 PSI per minute.

Satisfied, she dropped the pressure to 14.7 PSI and waited ten more minutes while slowly starting the airlock pressure bleed-down. The moment the pressure outside equaled the pressure inside the airlock, Diane checked the chest-mounted timer.

Forty-five minutes of prebreathing. It’ll have to do.

She took two additional minutes to bring the EMU pressure down gradually to six PSI instead of the recommended four PSI for maximum EMU flexibility without excessive muscle fatigue. At pressures higher than four PSI, the flight suit became more rigid, but Diane had no choice when presented with the option between risking nitrogen-induced bends and exerting a little more effort to move. In another fifteen minutes she planned to lower it to four psi to extend the life her PLSS.

She lowered a sun visor over the helmet before reaching for the hatch actuator lock lever and turning it 180 degrees. She pulled the D-shaped door toward her a few inches and then rotated it up until it rested with the low-pressure side facing the airlock ceiling.

Thirteen

“What did you say?” asked Jake Cohen, slowly turning toward the blond-headed EECOM, the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables Systems Engineer.

“S-band telemetry shows zero pressurization inside the airlock, sir.”

“Dammit!”

“No, sir. You don’t understand. The pressure didn’t leak out. It was intentionally bled out by someone inside the airlock. My data is also showing an opened hatch to the payload bay. Someone up there just started an EVA.”

“And we can’t talk to the astronaut?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. All we can do is read the telemetry data on S-band.”

“Damn. I wish that K-band antenna was there,” said Cohen. In reality, Endeavour had given up the K-band antenna to accommodate a second RMS manipulator arm. The K-band antenna could have allowed an alternate communications channel between the orbiter and Houston Control after the S-band antenna was damaged during the laser shoot-out.

Jake Cohen grabbed the phone to update his superiors. Just thirty minutes ago he had gotten word from Andrews Air Force base that a squadron of F-22s armed with ANSAT — antisatellite — missiles was standing by waiting for the order to shoot down the station before the terrorist regained control of the warheads. Now maybe there was a chance that the station could still be salvaged if the surviving astronauts could reach the ISS in time.

Fourteen

Diane Williams held on to the handrails to push herself through the opening and into the payload bay, where she closed her eyes to avoid getting disoriented from the multiaxial rotation of the orbiter with respect to the Earth. She had not noticed it before because of her enclosure inside the airlock, but now that she was in the bay, her eyes instantly sent an alarm to her brain. Vertigo. Nausea.

Fighting what she knew would be deadly spatial disorientation, Diane opened her eyes, but kept them focused inside the payload bay, forcing herself to ignore anything outside her small world. Breathing slow and deep to get her body under control, she decided that her initial observation from inside the airlock had been correct. Everything seemed out of place, with most of the standard equipment missing, including one of the two Manned Maneuvering Units (MMU) or self-propelled backpacks, one payload bay door, both RMS arms, the segmented mirror, video cameras, one Payload Assistance Module, floodlights. All gone.

Diane pushed herself to the rear of the cargo area, where she reached the open-canopy AMV, realizing that it would take a miracle to get any use out of it. The missing MMU had crashed against the delicate control panel of the AMV, smashing the stealth vehicle electronics, which, on closer inspection, she decided were vital for proper operation of the AMV’s jet thrusters.

Appalled at her bad luck, Diane exhaled heavily, pounding a gloved hand against the black composite skin of the crippled vehicle, her only way of reaching the station … or was it?

Her eyes darted across the payload bay toward the undamaged MMU, the backpack system used by astronauts since the 1980s for untethered EVA. Although NASA prohibited astronauts from using the MMU at distances farther than three hundred feet from the orbiter, Diane knew that as long as there was compressed nitrogen in the MMU tanks, the jets could propel her for miles. The only problem she faced was that she didn’t know which way to go. But Diane noticed that the Lockheed AMV carried a small homing unit, which she unstrapped from the side of the vehicle. She also grabbed one of four HandHeld Maneuvering Units from the back of the AMV. The small HHMUs were most likely intended to be used by the UNSC soldiers to maneuver themselves away from the AMV after arriving at the station. Now Diane would use it as a backup in case something went wrong with her MMU.

Armed with the homing device and the HHMU, Diane pushed herself back toward the MMU parked next to the airlock. She stopped in front of the maneuvering unit, attached to the payload bay wall with a framework that had a stirruplike foot restraint. Diane placed both EMU boots inside the stirrups and visually inspected the unit, checking the battery and nitrogen-propellant readings, both of which showed fully charged.

Turning around, Diane backed herself against the MMU, until the PLSS backpack locked in place. She extended both control arms of the MMU and placed her hands on the hand controllers. The right controller would give her acceleration for roll, pitch, and yaw, while the left one gave her the power to produce translational acceleration along three different planes: forward-back, up-down, and left-right.

Diane used her left hand to reach for the main power switch located above her right shoulder, and a second later the MMU locator lights came on. She reached with her right hand for the manual locator light switch over her left shoulder and turned it off. It was bad enough that the Russian aboard the ISS might be able to pick her up on radar. She definitely didn’t feel like flashing her location like a beacon in the darkness of space.

Strapping the small HandHeld Maneuvering Unit to one of the MMU arms, and the homing radar to the other, Diane prepared herself to execute a maneuver she had never done before.

She currently moved with the same translational and rotational speed as Endeavour. She had to jettison away from the rotating wreckage without changing her rotational velocity with respect to the orbiter so that a section of the orbiter would not come crashing against her.

Since the orbiter seemed to be rotating around an axis close to the center of the payload bay, Diane decided to slowly jet herself toward it, reaching a position nearest to Endeavour’s zero-rotation point.

She applied full pressure to the aft-facing jets, which spewed nitrogen in one direction and gently pushed her in the other, along a line near perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Twenty seconds later she had moved close to 150 feet from the orbiter, which continued to rotate just as fast as she did.

The Earth, orbiter, and the cosmos flashing on her viewplate, Diane applied two lateral thrusts to counter her clockwise rotation, making a few fine adjustments until she floated upside down, with a large portion of the South American continent hanging overhead.

At that distance she finally saw the damage done to the orbiter, realizing the power of the GPATS laser. Actually, Endeavour didn’t look like an orbiter anymore, but more like a black-and-white cylindrical hunk of space junk.

Diane also slowly came to terms with the fact that she was alone, forgotten, probably given up for dead by Mission Control. All she had was the gear she had taken with her. The compressed nitrogen inside her MMU tanks. The eight hours’ worth of oxygen and pressurization that the PLSS could provide her EMU suit, plus the thirty-minute emergency oxygen reserve unit below the PLSS’s main oxygen tanks. She wished she could use her radio, somehow tell Mission Control — tell Jake — that she had survived. But her only link to ground was through an orbiter that no longer existed. Diane was her own spaceship, her own world. The steady flow of oxygen from the PLSS system — carried through a maze of tubes into the back of her helmet — was her life. She depended on it as much as she depended on the system’s heater exchange and sublimator to warm the oxygen before it reached the inside of her helmet to avoid fogging the faceplate. Diane depended on the chilled water running through hundreds of feet of plastic tubing lacing her suit liner to maintain her body temperature. She relied on the multiple layers of insulation of the EMU suit to keep her body from direct exposure to temperatures that would boil her blood in seconds.

Diane Williams drew from a distinguished space career and from her decade of military training to shove those thoughts aside and concentrate on the job. She was Mission Commander. She was in control of her space vehicle, regardless of whether that vehicle measured as large as an orbiter or as minute as her EMU enclosure. Being in charge meant keeping her emotions and fears aside, letting her logical side take over. It meant activating the homing unit and steering her MMU propulsion system toward a space station out of her visual range, but a station she knew floated out there, somewhere in the vast emptiness of space.

Diane Williams glanced at Endeavour one last time, thought about McGregor and the UNSCF soldiers for one final moment before using the jets to turn around and align herself with the information shown on the liquid crystal display of the homing device. Diane fired the thrusters until she’d put herself in a collision course with the space station. She hoped her orbital trajectory would get her to the station in less than eight hours.

Fifteen

Sergei Dudayev stared at the screen while eating from a pouch of dried peaches. The moment was near. During his last orbital pass over the Caucasus Mountains, he had gotten confirmation of the deployment orders. Russia refused to yield to Chechnya’s request to take possession of nuclear warheads for self-defense. It had also refused to pull back the tank divisions deployed to the border.

Soon I will show them that we mean our threats.

Sixteen

Seven and a half hours into her journey to reach the station, Diane Williams began to feel the effects of the carbon dioxide her nearly discharged Primary Life Support System backpack could not fully extract from her EMU suit. The centrifugal fan of the PLSS, running at nearly twenty thousand RPM, slowly failed to draw the contaminated oxygen from the normal rate of 0.17 cubic meter per minute down to 0.14 and dropping — according to her chest-mounted display. In addition, the slow warming trend inside the suit also told her that the PLSS feedwater pump and heat exchanger and sublimator, designed to maintain a steady flow of chilled water through the hundreds of feet of plastic tubing lacing the LCVG underwear Diane wore, were also fading.

The situation would only get worse, with the suit slowly turning into a greenhouse as humidity and temperature got out of control, fogging the faceplate and eventually suffocating her.

She had to act, and fast, while she could still see through the pressurized polycarbonate plastic sphere underneath the gold-coated visor protecting her eyes from the blinding ultraviolet rays of a sun that had loomed over the horizon a half hour ago. Diane activated the EMU’s purge valve to bleed the carbon dioxide into space before switching to the secondary oxygen pack NASA added to the bottom of the unit to ensure the safety of astronauts in case of main PLSS failure.

Operating in open-loop mode, where the oxygen she breathed did not get circulated back to the PLSS but went through the purge valve, Diane checked the timer on the chest-mounted display. She had around fifty minutes’ worth of oxygen left.

That should be enough.

Squeezing the last of the nitrogen pressure inside the Manned Maneuvering Unit’s tanks, Diane used the station’s long frame, only five hundred feet away, to block the blinding sun. So far, the station showed no sign of alarm.

Soon that’ll change, she decided, aware of the station’s proximity sensors. Although they had not been sensitive enough to detect her yet, they were designed to detect any object with a radar cross section larger than a half foot getting within five hundred feet of the station.

Her viewplate beginning to fog and her EMU suit temperature climbing out of the comfort zone, Diane opened the purge valve a bit more, which also meant her oxygen supply would decrease at a faster rate. She didn’t have a choice. She had to keep the helmet from fogging at all costs while commanding the MMU to thrust her toward the hyperbaric airlock attached to the Unity Module.

Seventeen

Sergei Dudayev was ready when the slot under the keyboard opened. Upon inserting the badge, the screen changed to a blinking:

The Russian cosmonaut smiled. Then the station’s proximity alarm went off.

Eighteen

Diane Williams noticed a number of red lights flashing on some modules. The proximity alarm motion sensors had detected her. She needed a decoy.

Unstrapping the HandHeld Maneuvering Unit from the side of the PLSS, Diane disengaged herself from the backpack propulsion system that had carried her all the way there. A hard kick against the MMU to push herself toward the station, and Diane watched the MMU tumble out of control away from her.

Now came the tricky part. All she had to propel herself toward the station was the HHMU, very similar to the ones used for EVAs during the Gemini Program of the 1960s, and seldom used by modern-day space voyagers because of the readily available and highly sophisticated MMUs.

Diane held the three-jet maneuvering gun with both hands. There were two jets located at the ends of the rod and aimed back. A third jet, located at the center of the rod, faced forward. Remembering the technique used by those early space explorers, Diane Williams centered the gun close to her lower chest — the place she estimated to be closest to her center of mass. Visually lining up the rear-facing jets with the airlock hatch roughly three hundred feet away, Diane fired the gun, releasing a symmetrical burst of compressed oxygen from both jets, propelling herself more or less in the desired direction.

Finally learning the limitations of the HHMU — and also the frustration of those Gemini astronauts — Diane found herself making slight correction on the firing angle of the jets while lowering the gun to her waist, below the chest-mounted display to avoid a slight rotational motion induced by firing the thrusters out of line with her true center of mass. Slowly, using a combination of forward thrusts and also firing the reverse thruster to break her momentum, Diane reached the airlock hatch.

Nineteen

The proximity alarms blaring, Sergei Dudayev checked the radar and verified the existence of an object at less than five hundred feet from the station.

Puzzled, he floated back into Unity and up to the cupola. Using a restraint system that enabled him to rotate easily for viewing through any of the windows, the Russian spotted an empty Manned Maneuvering Unit drifting away from the station.

An MMU?

Realizing that the ISS didn’t carry any MMUs, Sergei concluded that unless for some very strange law of physics one of Endeavour’s MMUs had been dislodged from its flight station and floated in this direction, the presence of the backpack system could only mean one thing.

Twenty

After performing an emergency bleed of the air inside the airlock by using the small control panel built in on the D-shaped EVA hatch door, Diane Williams pressed her left hand against the manual unlocking lever while holding on to the adjacent handle with her right. Three full clockwise turns, and she pulled the hatch door back several inches before a spring-loaded mechanism rotated it upward. Floating inside the airlock, Diane closed the hatch behind her and repressurized the compartment.

Twenty-one

Sergei noticed the red lights blinking on the control panel of the crew support station, which told him that an emergency airlock bleed had been done. The EVA hatch had been opened, then closed, and now the airlock was being repressurized.

Cursing his stupidity for assuming that the crew of Endeavour had perished in the attack, Sergei kicked his legs against the side of the cupola and reached Unity, sighing in relief when noticing that the hatch connecting the airlock to the bottom of the node was still closed. Without further thought, he locked it from the inside.

Twenty-two

Diane finished pressurizing the airlock and noticed the green light above the hatch connecting her compartment to Unity turning red. Realizing that the Russian had most likely found her, she decided not to depressurize her EMU suit just yet. Instead, she reached for the communications panel on the side of the airlock wall and set it to the standard EVA mode UHF frequency 121 Mhz. Next, she remotely switched on the station’s K-band antenna to close the ISS-Houston link via a TRDS and White Sands Tracking Station.

“Houston, this is Endeavour’s Mission Commander Diane Williams, over.”

“Wh — what? Come in … come in, Commander! Jesus Christ! We thought … great to hear from you!” Diane heard an unfamiliar voice coming through.

“I have little time before Dudayev catches on and cuts us off. I’ve reached the station. I’m trapped inside the airlock and have less than twenty minutes left of oxygen in my PLSS.”

“Diane, this is Jake.”

Diane smiled thinly. “Jake, the orbiter’s gone. McGregor and the UNSCF soldiers didn’t make it. The bastard now has me locked out of the station.”

“Calm down and listen carefully there might be a way to—”

Diane frowned. “Houston? Houston? Come in, Houston.”

Twenty-three

A few keystrokes on the computer keyboard of the Multipurpose Applications Console, and Sergei disconnected the communications link between the airlock and the rest of the station. An American astronaut — Diane Williams — had managed to exchange a few words with Houston Control, and although Sergei had not been pleased with that fact, he had at least gotten a good idea of Diane’s desperate oxygen situation. The American was running out of air, and in another twenty minutes she would no longer present any danger to his mission.

He commanded the computer system to purge the airlock.

Twenty-four

“Houston, can you read? Hous—”

The emergency purge alarm went off inside the airlock, conveying the Russian’s intentions. Glad that she had maintained EMU pressurization, Diane searched for the maintenance tools stowed inside compartments on all four walls of the airlock, finding what she sought: a heavy-duty, battery-operated drill, to which she attached a four-inch-diameter stainless-steel serrated disk at the end of the drive shaft. She had seen what the tool could do when McGregor had cut open the jammed Titan shroud to release the segmented mirror.

Pressing the tool’s on-off switch twice to verify proper operation, Diane unlocked the exterior hatch. Having secured the power tool to a six-foot-long woven line that she clipped to her EMU suit, Diane used the HHMU to move away from the D-shaped opening, past the modules, and toward the long, thin structural framework that ended in one set of solar panels.

Rapidly exhausting the compressed oxygen inside the handheld propulsion unit, Diane grabbed a tubular member of the truss assembly. Painted black, the tube — made of aluminum-clad graphite epoxy — was both lighter and relatively stronger than metal. Diane hugged it with her left arm while strapping the HHMU to the side of the EMU suit.

Crawling inside the tubular framework, Diane reached a black tube running all the way from a set of solar panels, still a hundred feet away, to the center of the station. The contents of the tube — thick electrical cables — fed the massive array of nickel-hydrogen batteries and the power converter that provided the GPATS module weapons system with the necessary energy to generate the destructive chemical reaction. The battery also fed the computer system that controlled the warheads and their launching units.

Pulling on the woven line, Diane clasped the power saw in her gloves and turned it on. The serrated wheel began its silent, high-velocity spin. Diane anchored herself between adjacent beams before pressing the round blade against the side of the tube, immediately slicing through the soft composite material and into the thick wires, which bathed her in a cloud of sizzling debris. On Earth, such action would have resulted in a cloud of sparks, but in the vacuum of space, the intensely hot particles had no oxygen to burn.

Her EMU gloves insulating her from the 208 volts of electricity generated by the solar panels, Diane made several cuts to achieve a clean separation. Satisfied, she crawled back out of the framework and moved toward where the large laser gun stood atop the GPATs module.

Twenty-five

Sergei Dudayev heard another alarm coming from the GPATS module and instinctively pushed himself out of the Hab Module, through Unity, and into GPATS, where one of the computer screens at the front of the module told him of an EPS recharge system failure. The Electrical Power System no longer received a charge from the solar panels, and had automatically switched to the battery packs, which had a charge life of thirty hours — much less if he had to use the laser system.

Cursing, Sergei floated back into Unity and through the connecting hatch to the cupola, where he watched the American astronaut floating by the base of the laser gun.

No! Not the laser!

Returning to the GPATS module, Sergei made up his mind and pressed the launch button for the selected warhead. Its destination: the Russian troops on the border with Chechnya.

Sergei wished he could release the remaining warheads, but he had to take care of the American first. Without the laser the station would be defenseless against another attack.

Floating back into Unity, Sergei used the remote actuators to close the outer hatch before repressurizing the hyperbaric airlock. He opened the inner hatch and floated toward one of two one-piece AMEX AX-5 Advanced Hard Suits, made of aluminum and containing no fabric or soft parts, except for the joints, enhancing mobility and comfort for the wearer. The suit had integrated helmet, gloves, and boots.

Entering the suit from a hatch in the rear, Sergei slipped in both legs first, followed by the upper part of his body. Once inside, he backed himself against a Self-Propelled Life Support System backpack, which perfectly covered the square hatch opening, creating a seal after the magnetic latches all around the joint snapped in place. Pressing two buttons on his chest-mounted display and control panel pressurized the AX-5 to twelve PSI — one of the advantages of the new suit since it eliminated the need to prebreathe pure oxygen prior to an EVA.

The sound of his own breathing ringing in his ears, Sergei depressurized the compartment and opened the hatch. He could waste no time. The American had already disabled the GPATS battery-charging system and was now about to sabotage the laser.

The AX-5 integrated thruster system — a simplified version of the MMU — consisted of sixteen compressed nitrogen jets instead of the MMU’s twenty-four. Operating two joystick-type controls on his chest-mounted panel, Sergei fired the aft-facing thrusters to propel himself away from the station and get a bird’s eye view of his enemy.

Rotating himself in the direction of Diane, Sergei once more fired the thrusters. This time, however, he did it for nearly ten seconds, giving himself a forward velocity of around five feet per second.

Twenty-six

Diane Williams had just finished cutting the array of cables that controlled the sophisticated servomotors of the gimbal-mounted laser gun when she noticed an external door opening on the side of the GPATS module.

She cringed when a single sleek cylinder, roughly fifteen feet in length by three in diameter, slowly left the station after being pushed away by its spring-loaded release mechanism, designed to get the warhead away from the station before firing its reentry booster.

With less than ten minutes of oxygen left, and with the warhead floating farther away from the station, Diane decided to go after the warhead while it was still floating near the GPATS module.

Switching off the power saw and letting it float at the end of the woven line, Diane reached for the HHMU, but her hands never got there.

Twenty-seven

Sergei rammed the American female astronaut at a relative velocity of nearly five feet per second. The blow, cushioned by the thick aluminum suit and also by the high-pressure environment around Sergei’s body, barely bothered him or his heavy high-technology garment, but it sent the American tumbling out of control toward the framework to the right of the U.S. Laboratory Module.

Twenty-eight

The powerful blow took Diane Williams entirely by surprise. Her forehead crashed against the polycarbonate plastic helmet before the Earth and the station flashed around her. In one of the flashes, she caught a glimpse of what had crashed against her. The Russian terrorist had suited up and come after her in one of the rugged AX-5 suits.

She finished that thought when another blow, this one to the back of her head, nearly knocked her out as she smashed into the tubular framework near the … where in the hell am I? She pulled free of the stiff latticework just to be welcomed by a foot shoved against her chest-mounted display.

“Bastard!” she muttered in between breaths as her legs got caught in the crossbeams and batons of the framework. Blinking rapidly to prevent her tears from separating from her eyes and floating inside her helmet, Diane saw the Russian thrusting himself upward for several feet before an expulsion of compressed nitrogen gas from the upward-facing thrusters drove him back down at great speed. This time both feet stabbed her midriff, hammering her farther into the latticework.

Catching her breath, Diane feared that her suit would rip at any moment. The warning lights on her EMU’s chest mounted display told her that Sergei had already damaged something, but with her body lodged in the framework at such unnatural angle she needed time to free herself.

Struggling to remain focused, Diane pulled on the woven line, but before her fingers could grab the power saw, Sergei descended on her once more. Tightening her stomach muscles, Diane took the blow better than her suit, which emitted a high-pitched noise that told her she was losing pressurization.

Sergei floated himself up once more. Diane began to feel dizzy and lightheaded as her suit began to lose life-supporting pressure. Fortunately, her prebreathing had removed all nitrogen from her bloodstream, preventing the bends caused by a sudden drop in external body pressure. Quickly, she turned the emergency oxygen knob fully open to maintain an endurable level of pressure.

With the image of the Russian’s boots coming down on her again, Diane Williams switched on the power saw and firmly held it with both hands against the approaching boots. Every ounce of strength left flowed into her arms, locked at the elbow. She could not afford another blow. Her EMU would not take it. She had to stop him.

The Russian landed over her. Diane drove the spinning blade into the base of his left boot, letting the serrated edge sink deep into the aluminum, creating a cloud of sparkling white debris.

Twenty-nine

Sergei noticed that the American held out her arms to prevent him from crashing against the EMU. He sensed the resisting motion and got ready to propel himself back up when he felt something strange. For a moment he wasn’t sure what it was. It sounded like a malfunctioning fan, or a grinding noise of some sort.

Suddenly, his suit’s pressure began to drop, and a burning pain from his heel reached his brain, telling Sergei that the American had pierced the AX-5. Instantly commanding the thrusters to push him back up, he noticed the white cloud surrounding Diane Williams, and he also noticed the object in her hands.

A power saw!

His suit’s pressure dropping rapidly below two PSI, Sergei bent in pain from the millions of nitrogen bubbles expanding in his bloodstream. His joints ached to a climax and the cramps in his stomach and intestines scourged him. He could no longer control his body. He was paralyzed, unable to make the smallest movement, except for his eyes, which he focused on the chest-mounted display that told him that he should already be dead. A moment later he passed away.

Thirty

As the limp body of the Russian floated away from her, Diane Williams used her hands to free her right leg, caught in between two crossbeams. That gave her the leeway to position her body so that it became easy to release her other leg from a pair of tubes running along the length of the latticework.

Feeling dizzy, Diane used the HHMU strapped to the side of her backpack unit to move toward the airlock’s open hatch. Finding it harder to breathe, she pushed herself through the opening, forcing her mind to remain focused. Her fingers groped around the control panel on the opposite wall, managing to engage the servomotor to close the hatch before pressurizing the compartment.

She fumbled with the visor assembly latch for a few seconds, finally removing it, letting it float overhead while releasing the helmet joining ring. The locking mechanism snapped, and she pushed the clear hemisphere up.

A breath of air. She exhaled and breathed deeply again, coughing, inhaling once more.

A distant rumble brought her gaze toward the airlock’s porthole. The missile’s thruster fired to commence Earth reentry. Regretting having disabled the laser, Diane removed her EMU suit, leaving on only the cooling garment as she unlocked and opened the hatch leading to Unity and the cupola beyond it, where she engaged the K-band antenna.

Thirty-one

Jake Cohen sat upright when Diane William’s voice crackled through the overhead speakers in the Flight Control Room at Johnson Space Center.

“Houston, come in, over.”

“Houston here. What in the world is going on up there?”

“Houston, the station is under control, but we have a serious problem. The terrorist managed to fire one warhead. It just started its deorbit burn.”

“Stand by,” Jake said over the radio, before calling NORAD to advise them of the situation. He then contacted Andrews Air Force Base to call back the F-22s. The terrorist aboard the International Space Station had been neutralized. The Air Force would try to halt the attack, but Jake was warned that it might be too late already.

The veteran CapCom slowly hung up the phone before reaching for the mike in front of him. He had to warn Diane of the possibility of ANSAT missiles heading her way.

“Houston here.”

“I’m still here, Houston, go ahead.”

Jake struggled to remain as professional as he could, particularly when all eyes in the Flight Control Room were on him. “Situation report?”

“Just accessed the station through Unity. Currently performing a visual check, looking for the rest of the crew. So far I haven’t found anyone else.”

“I’m afraid we might have bad news for you. A squadron of F-22s is currently trying to shoot you down with ANSAT missiles. We’re trying to call them back, but we might be too late.”

“Did you say ANSAT?”

“Affirmative. You’re might have to use the laser.”

“That’s a negative, Houston. I disabled the laser before coming inside the station. It’s out of commission until we can get a crew to come up here and repair it. I’m afraid if any of those ANSATs are fired, this place is going be in real trouble.”

Jake closed his eyes. “Okay, listen. In that case you need to be ready to get into the Soyuz escape vehicle and leave the station immediately. You’ve stopped the terrorist from launching any more warheads. We’ll deal later with the damage those missiles might do to the station.”

“That’s a negative, Houston. There has to be another way.”

Dammit, Diane! Jake thought, before saying as calmly as he could, “ISS, Houston. There is nothing you can do. Repeat, there is nothing you can do without the laser. If the ANSATs are fired, they will destroy the station.”

“Houston, I have an idea.”

Thirty-two

Colonel Keith Myers kept the rearward pressure on his sidestick as the F-22 soared above 80,000 feet. Brief side glances out of his canopy, and the forty-eight-year-old colonel verified the tight inverted-V formation of his five-jet squadron.

The F-22 was a beautiful plane, and Myers loved to fly it. The advanced tactical fighter-bomber, brought into full production only last year, was a worthy replacement of the venerable F-15 Eagle, which had carried the Air Force through the latter portion of the twentieth century. Myers had been one of five test pilots of the two prototypes built by McDonnell Douglas, and at the end of the evaluation period he had been assigned to lead the first wing out of Andrews.

A medium-built, muscular man with fair skin and short brown hair, Myers looked and acted the role of the typical Air Force squadron commander. He was cocky and sometimes borderline-arrogant, but he knew how to carry out orders and get his men motivated to follow them as well. On the ground he was a bastard, who pushed everyone to do and act their best, but once airborne, he was the ideal flight leader, wise and courageous, fully capable of making lifesaving, split-second decisions.

Myers definitely knew how to follow orders, even when those orders meant the destruction of one of the world’s greatest technological achievements: the International Space Station.

“Leader to Ghosts, Leader to Ghosts,” Myers said over the squadron frequency. “Prepare to release.”

“Roger,” came the response from his other four jets, each carrying a single ANSAT missile attached to the underfuselage pallet.

Myers activated the ordnance-release system. Firing the ANSAT was quite simple because of the nature of the missile, which was already preprogrammed to home in on the station flying 105 miles overhead. There was no radar control from the parent craft or from an overhead satellite to guide it to its target. The ANSATs were shoot-and-forget. According to the briefing, Myers would fire his missile first. Each of his men would follow serially until all five missiles had been fired.

Shoving the sidestick back while pushing full throttle, Myers pointed the nose to the upper layers of the stratosphere before pressing a button on the sidestick.

A silver missile glided upward in a parabolic flight as he rolled the jet and pulled away. The missile continued skyward solely on the momentum it had gained from the F-22, until right before reaching its apex, when the single solid-propellant booster kicked in and projected it up at great speed.

“Leader’s out,” commented Myers as he watched his wingman get into position for his release.

“Ghost Leader, Ghost Leader, Eagle’s Nest, over.”

“Nest, Leader, over.”

“Abort, Leader. Repeat, abort mission. Authorization code Three-Niner-Alpha-Zulu-Seven-Six-Lima-Charlie.”

Myers glanced at the small notepad strapped right below the Heads-Up Display. Abort Code 39AZ76LC. That’s a match.

“Leader to Ghosts, Leader to Ghosts. Abort, abort. RTB, RTB.”

“Roger,” responded the other four jets, acknowledging not just the abort, but also the Return-To-Base order.

Colonel Myers watched his wingman rolling his jet out of the climb and returning to formation with the ANSAT still strapped to his F-22’s belly.

Myers said, “Nest, Ghost Leader. One demon got away. Repeat. One demon got away. Other four demons secured. RTB.”

“Roger, Lead. Will pass it on.”

The runaway ANSAT’s thruster still burning in the distance, Myers cut back throttles and dropped his F-22’s nose. His squadron followed him.

Thirty-three

As she floated inside the Habitation Module, Diane Williams only had two more minutes before the ANSAT missile reached her orbit. She inserted the keys she had removed from the GPATS’ launching station into the key slots on the top of the keyboard of the Multipurpose Application Console, connected to the central electronic brain of the station.

The screen came up with a list of menus, each containing its own list of submenus and commands. She chose a menu that controlled the station’s rotational verniers. A three-dimensional drawing on the screen showed the ISS’s current attitude with respect to Earth, and also indicated that the station was operating under automatic computer control. She switched to manual, transferring control of the verniers to a joystick controller next to the station.

She then programmed the station to split the large screen in two. The bottom section still displayed the station’s attitude, but the top section now showed a color radar map of the ISS and its surroundings. The resolution was set to 250 miles out, and it showed no sign of the ANSAT yet.

“Houston, ISS. I’m all set, over.”

“All right, ISS,” Jake Cohen responded from Mission Control. “ANSAT is three hundred miles high two hundred ninety miles downrange with a closing velocity of seven hundred miles per hour. It should show on your screen any moment now.”

Diane’s eyes never left the display as she said, “I see you.” The blue dot entered Diane’s range from the east and approached the station at great speed. She estimated another minute to impact.

The fingers of her right hand caressed the plastic surface of the joystick. Her eyes followed the blue dot, blinking its way across the screen.

She waited, knowing she would only have one chance at this. Her military background told her that the radar-controlled ANSAT would home in on the area with the largest mass, namely the core of the station. A direct hit there would certainly destroy the ISS.

The ANSAT got within fifty miles. That was the mark. She moved the joystick to the right, and the station’s rotational verniers responded by firing counterclockwise. She watched the screen as the station’s 3-D drawing began to rotate. Twenty seconds to impact.

The ANSAT was too close to make any large corrections as its electronic brain detected a shift in the relative location of its target’s center of mass. The microprocessor stored inside the missile’s cone ordered the firing of the small attitude control verniers to make a slight adjustment in the flight path, and in another few seconds the missile struck the south section of the boom, near the only functional set of solar panels, over two hundred feet away from any module. The ensuing explosion severed the solar panels in a brief display of orange flames.

Diane was thrown against the food galley, bounced and landed feetfirst against the large panoramic window next to the crew’s recreational station. Her shoulders and back burned. Through the largest and thickest piece of tempered glass ever put in orbit Diane Williams saw the damage as the station rotated clockwise, out of control, but at least in one piece. She had spared the core of the station from a direct hit. However, the blast had sent a powerful electromagnetic pulse through the cables connecting the solar panels to the station’s batteries, shorting them out.

Alarms blared inside the Habitation Module. Red lights, indicating a major power malfunction, flashed at each entrance to the module. Just as suddenly, sparks and smoke spewed from underneath the floor tiles near the Multipurpose Application Console. The bright overheads suddenly went off, replaced by green emergency lights. The computers, sensing that they had lost power from the main batteries, automatically switched to the emergency shutdown program, which began to power down all systems according to a priority sequence.

Stunned but fully conscious, the forty-five-year-old ex-Marine aviator thrust herself through the smoke and sparks and back to the Multipurpose Applications Console, where she snagged the joystick and tried unsuccessfully to stabilize the station. She tried to switch to automatic control, but the system did not respond.

Another alarm began to blare inside the station. Diane recognized its high pulsating pitch: The station was losing pressurization and oxygen. The air pressurization and revitalization system had shut down. At least the station had survived, but it would take a couple of shuttle flights to get it back in shape to support life.

Time to go.

Finding it harder to breathe, her ears beginning to ring from the air-pressure drop, Diane kicked her legs against the MPAC and floated out of the Habitation Module and into Unity. The Soyuz capsule was coupled to the node through a four-foot-long narrow tunnel.

Feeling dizzy, her vision fogging, Diane reached the connecting D-shaped hatch, opened it, and dived through the tunnel into Russian technology.

Her head feeling about to explode, she floated inside the cramped interior of the Soyuz capsule. Closing the access hatch, locking it in place, Diane strapped herself to the center of three seats arranged side by side.

Her vision tunneling, Diane’s fingers groped over the control pane searching for the pressurization lever, finding it, throwing it.

Hissing oxygen filled the capsule. The pounding against her eardrums stopped, and after a few deep breaths, her vision cleared, allowing her to inspect the capsule, which lacked an interior wall. Most of the electronic wiring and hydraulic tubing ran fully exposed along steel walls. A porthole directly above provided her only window to the outside, and at that moment it showed Diane the side of Unity.

Placing her hands on a set of levers on the sides of her seat, Diane pulled them up and twisted them ninety degrees.

The capsule jettisoned away from the station, throwing Diane against her restraining harness. Soon she saw nothing but space through the porthole.

Following a preprogrammed reentry sequence, the capsule fired the attitude-control verniers to position the Soyuz’s main thruster in the direction of flight. As she waited for the capsule to reach the point in orbit when the rocket would fire to start the reentry, Diane Williams snagged the radio headset secured with a Velcro strap by her left knee, and put it on. She switched on the communications radio and selected a frequency of 252.0 MHz to make a connection with the TDRS-White Sands-Houston link.

“Houston, SES, over,” Diane said from the Soyuz Escape System.

“Diane! What happened. We lost communication!”

“The station lost pressure and oxygen. It lost the south end of the boom and solar panels to the ANSAT. I’m afraid some systems and subsystems may have been damaged. But the station is in one piece and still in orbit.”

“Status of GPATS module?”

“Deactivated. I have both control keys—”

Her words were cut short by a powerful jolt as the single thruster fired. “Houston, SES. Just started deorbit burn,” Diane reported.

“Roger, SES. We’re tracking you. Estimated landing site is southern Ukraine.”

“Status of the warhead that got away, Houston?”

“Not good, SES. It struck a Russian tank battalion near the border with Chechnya fifteen minutes ago. First estimates are over two thousand dead and many more wounded.”

“Damn.”

“It could have been a lot worse, SES. The tanks were spread out over a large area. If it would have hit a heavily populated area casualties would have been much higher.” Her eyes watched the star-filled cosmos rush past her porthole as the capsule decelerated from its 24,000-miles-per-hour flight.

The burn ended and was replaced by a strong vibration as the first air molecules began to strike the capsule’s underside heat shield, heating it to incandescence.

Soon the vibrations grew, accompanied by a pink glow around the edges of the window. Inside her pocket of life traveling inside a decelerating hell of steel-melting temperatures, Diane Williams sat back and watched the pink glow turn into a bright orange just before the Soyuz craft became engulfed by the flames.

Closing her eyes, the ex-Marine tried to relax. She had made it against staggering odds. The remaining weapons aboard the station would remain safe until NASA could get another crew up there to repair it. But that no longer her concerned her.

The rumble of the capsule rushing through the upper layers of the atmosphere increased to a soul-numbing crescendo. Thin air and insulation compounds collided in a scorching outburst of flames. With the might and beauty of a meteor dropping from the sky, the Soyuz capsule sliced through the air at great speed.

Diane Williams dropped like a rock, the flames slowly fading away as the capsule decelerated to the point when the deorbit program disengaged the heat shield to expose three retrorockets to be used ten feet over ground to cushion the fall. At an altitude of thirty thousand feet, bright red twin parachutes deployed from the top of the capsule, giving Diane the jerk of a lifetime.

The first rays of sunlight shafted through her round windowpane, filling the interior of the Soyuz capsule with wan orange light. Mission Commander Diane Williams watched it in silence.

About the Author

R. J. PINEIRO is the author of several technothrillers, including Ultimatum, Retribution, Breakthrough, Exposure, Shutdown, and the millennium thrillers 01-01-00 and Y2K. His new thriller, Conspiracy.com, will be published in April 2001. He is a seventeen-year veteran of the computer industry and is currently at work on leading-edge microprocessors, the heart of the personal computer. He was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in El Salvador before coming to the United States to pursue a higher education. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University, a second-degree black belt in martial arts, is a licensed private pilot, and a firearms enthusiast. He has traveled extensively through Central America, Europe, and Asia, both for his computer business as well as to research his novels. He lives in Texas with his wife, Lory, and his son, Cameron.

Visit R. J. Pineiro on the World Wide Web at www.rjpineiro.com. R. J. Pineiro also receives e-mails at author@rjpineiro.com.