Back to the Moon-ARC

Chapter 27

They were one day out from Earth when they received a message that the President would like to speak with them.

Painfully aware that the conversation would be broadcast on television and the Net, Bill Stetson arranged his multinational crew to make sure that Captain Hui and Dr. Xu were front and center. The aloof Zhi remained to one side while he and Chow each stood on the other.

It was actually a joint call from the President and Chairman Jiantao of China. After the expected congratulatory remarks by both leaders and a brief exchange of pleasantries from both the American and Chinese astronauts on board, followed by both leaders reciting a renewed commitment to working together in the peaceful exploration of space, the televised visit began drawing to a close.

Making his concluding remarks, the President said, “Captain Stetson, Dr. Chow, you are American heroes. Your bravery in making this trip to secure the safe return of our Chinese friends and explorers will go down in the history books as one of the greatest acts of heroism in the history of humanity. A grateful world thanks you.”

Knowing he was expected to respond, Stetson replied, “Thank you, sir. We are honored and proud to have been able to serve our country and help bring these, our new friends, home.”

The call ended, and a clearly relieved group of tired and dirty astronauts breathed a sigh of relief. Stetson returned to his seat and immediately began to once again review the procedures for their upcoming aerocapture. The maneuver had never before been used, and he wanted to make sure he knew what to expect.

Everyone else more or less returned to what they’d been doing before the call, except for Zhi. Purposefully he moved to the lower deck and toward the seat in which the stricken pilot was sleeping. Dr. Xu was also moving toward the pilot and, as a consequence, was the first to see Zhi remove the handgun from behind the seat. He let out a cry of protest.

Zhi’s eyes were on fire. He said to Xu, speaking in Chinese and for the first time, “I will not allow us to be demeaned and rescued like we are helpless children. We were to be the heroes. We were to return home to the parades. We were to be the symbols of the new China. Not them!”

Stetson and Chow did not understand the words, but they could tell from the tone and the gun that Zhi had gone over the edge. As he watched Zhi wave the deadly weapon, Stetson momentarily wondered why an engineer on a Moon mission would have a handgun. More urgently, he wondered what he planned to do with it.

“Captain Hui! What’s going on? What does he want? And please tell him that firing a gun in this ship could kill us all.”

Hui said something to the engineer in Chinese that immediately drew an angry response. Zhi lashed out with the gun and hit Dr. Xu across the cheek, sending the doctor tumbling toward the outer edge of the ship’s interior. Small red droplets were now floating in the air around Dr. Xu.

Zhi spat while he steadied his motion and spoke, this time in English. “I will not be humiliated. I will not allow our great country to be humiliated. We should have just died a hero’s death on the Moon. Now the world will bestow upon you the honor that should have been ours! You failed us, Captain!” Zhi turned to face Captain Hui and said, “You never had the courage to do what was required.”

Stetson could tell from Zhi’s countenance and posture that he was not bluffing. While he was looking at the Chinese taikonaut, Stetson moved his hands behind his back and slightly to the right, skimming over the control panel until they found one of the few actual switches still used on human spaceflight—the one that would turn off the automatic pilot.

When the system beeped, acknowledging that the command had been received, Zhi abruptly turned toward Stetson and shouted something as his fingers tightened on the trigger of the handgun.

Before he was able to fire the gun, the ship’s attitude-control thrusters fired in rapid bang-bang succession, causing the entire ship to begin tumbling.

The gun discharged, and the bullet barely missed hitting Stetson. Instead, it struck the floor beneath his feet. As Zhi moved to reorient himself and brought the gun up to fire again, Stetson launched himself across the room directly toward him. Simultaneously, Dr. Xu threw himself at Zhi, striking him on the side opposite his gun hand. With Stetson and Xu trying to disarm him, Zhi simply began rapidly pulling the trigger.

A bullet struck Dr. Xu in the leg, causing him to convulse and curl into a ball. The next bullet went wild and struck the floor like the first one. Before he could fire it again, Stetson cold-cocked him on the jaw, causing the enraged Zhi to let go of the gun and rebound toward the opposite wall.

Before Zhi could recover and reorient himself in the weightlessness of the Orion’s cabin, Hui had him in a choke hold.

Stetson quickly assessed the situation in the ship. The immediate threat posed by the Chinese engineer was neutralized—Hui had him pinned almost to the point of losing consciousnesses. Based on the amount of blood spheres floating through the cabin, Dr. Xu was severely injured. Tony Chow was already with Xu and working to stop the bleeding. The injured Chinese pilot was still out cold. The ship was tumbling, thanks to the distraction of the autopilot being turned off and Stetson’s engaging the attitude-control thrusters. The ship’s radio was signaling that mission control wanted to speak with them. And then there was the matter of the three gunshots.

Like we needed this bullshit! Stetson said to himself. “Tony, you take care of the doctor while I stop us from tumbling.” Stetson moved to the control panel and reengaged the automatic pilot. At that moment, orange and red lights began popping up across the ship’s status screens.

He said, “Captain Hui. Use some duct tape from the mechanical kit to tie up your friend. It ought to hold him. I’ve got to figure out what’s happened and why the screen looks like a Christmas tree.”

“Bill! You need to see this.” Chow looked up from Dr. Xu’s injured leg and motioned toward the hundreds of perfectly spherical red balls of blood circling in the air near the center of the crew cabin.

Stetson looked toward the blood and didn’t like what he saw. The spheres were moving toward the center of the Orion and swirling slowly around each other as they also moved toward the floor. As they neared the floor, they swirled around each other in a tighter circle, moving faster and faster, until they finally disappeared. A miniature funnel cloud had formed in the Orion, with the tip of the funnel being a hole in the floor made by one of Zhi’s bullets. They were losing air.

Stetson quipped, “That explains one of the alarms.” He moved toward the hole to get a closer look.

“I’ll use the patch kit. We have it aboard in case of a micro-meteor strike.” He moved to one of the storage bins along the outside wall of the capsule and opened a compartment. Inside the compartment was a small container filled with what looked like Silly Putty. The kit was standard issue aboard the Orion and designed for the purpose of repairing damage caused by a tiny meteor or orbital debris. Space was filled with small meteors, and, over time, the probability of a spacecraft getting hit was large enough to consider it a serious threat. The sealant could patch a small hole and keep the Orion from losing atmosphere.

“This patch ought to work.” Stetson carefully removed the putty from the container and filled the hole. The remaining blood spheres slowly dispersed after the airflow out of the cabin stopped.

“Zhi is secure. How may I help?” asked Hui.

Stetson looked toward the Chinese captain and saw that she had not only securely bound the renegade engineer but had taped his mouth shut as well.

“Uh…” Stetson thought for a second. “Why don’t you answer the radio while I tend to the rest of the alerts? The headset is on the control panel.”

Hui moved out from her position on the upper deck toward the control panel, eased on the headset and activated the radio.

“This is Captain Hui, speaking for Captain Stetson. Umm, how may I be of assistance?”

Stetson had to laugh and then said, “I bet they didn’t expect her to answer.”

He moved to the control panel and positioned himself only a few inches from his Chinese counterpart as she described the violence that had transpired aboard the ship to the ground crew back in Texas.

Stetson looked at the myriad of ship-status alerts and slowly turned them off, one by one, until only a few orange lights remained. None of them were still red, which meant the ship was not in imminent danger.

“Captain Stetson, your mission controllers wish to speak with you.” Hui slipped the headset from her head and handed it to him.

Stetson declined the headset, switched the audio to the loudspeaker, and said, “This is Stetson.”

“Bill, we were more than a little surprised to hear Captain Hui answer our call. We’ve been trying to reach you for quite some time. She says that you have everything under control and that the hole in the floor is sealed. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“How is Dr. Xu?”

Stetson looked toward Tony and Xu. Though he was obviously in pain, Xu gave a thumbs-up sign. Tony, after only a brief moment of hesitation, also gave a thumbs-up.

“He’ll make it.”

“Glad to hear it.” The mission controller then hesitated before he said, “Bill, there’s another problem you need to know about. The hole that you patched probably pierced the heat shield. The patch you put in place will keep you from losing atmosphere, but it will never survive the heat of reentry. Our models indicate that the hole on the outside of the ship is probably two or three times larger than what you see on the inside. The energy of the bullet was mostly deposited in the outer skin. If you don’t patch it on the outside with the heat-shield repair kit, then you might not survive the aerocapture.”

“EVA?” Stetson said.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to. Are you up for it?”

“Well, I am certainly okay with going out, but I am not sure about what to do with the rest of my crew. Their suits are a mess. It’ll take us some time to clean them for reuse. How much time do I have before we have to jettison the lander and begin reentry procedures?” The lander was not designed to return home to Earth. Before the Orion made its final entry into the Earth’s atmosphere for the upcoming aerocapture maneuver, the lander would have to be jettisoned. The big kicker would be if they had time to get in their suits and to complete an EVA before the aerocapture procedures began.

“Six hours.”

Not much time, Stetson thought. Then he replied, “That’s plenty of time. Stetson out.”

“Okay, folks, we’ve got to get suited up quickly. I’ve got to go outside and play.”

“You have another patch kit?” Hui asked.

“Yes. After the Columbia accident back in 2003, NASA developed a technique for patching damage to the shuttle’s heat shields so that similar accidents could be prevented. The requirement applied to the Orion as well—here we are. The heat-shield patch kit is stored near the one I just used. Without it, that hole will allow hot gases inside the ship and act like a blowtorch. We would never survive that.”

It took twenty minutes to get the injured Dr. Xu into his suit. Another thirty-five to get the unconscious pilot back into his suit. At first Zhi acted as if he were going to refuse to put his suit on, so Hui asked Stetson to hold the pistol on him while she and Tony supervised his suiting up. They then proceeded to duct tape him back down. That took another thirty minutes.

Chow opened up a secure radio channel to Stetson. “Bill, can we repressurize the Orion while you are on the EVA so I can have access to my patients? If one of them were to need attention, I’d like to be able to get to them quickly.”

“I don’t see why not. That way you can monitor the ship and run through the checklists again also. We know the damage that was caused by one of the bullets, but not the other two. I’d rather find out now than during aerocapture. How is Dr. Xu, really?”

“He’s lost a lot of blood, and the bullet severed his fibula—one of the bones in the lower leg. He’s stable but in a lot of pain. He should be okay if we can get him to a hospital soon. Putting him back in the suit was very painful for him. I gave him some morphine.”

“Okay, we’ve got just a little more than five hours to fix the ship, get back in, and get ready for aerocapture,” Stetson said. “Everybody has masks down and is ready for depressurization. Then Hui and I go outside and look for the damage on the ship. Once we find the damage, she comes back inside while I do the repair. It’s a one-person job anyway. While I’m outside, you repressurize the cabin. When I want back in, you do it all again in reverse order. That’s the plan. Got it?”

“Got it, Bill.” Tony nodded.

Hui would look at the top portion of the ship while Bill looked at the underside. Stetson communicated over the suit radio to Hui.

“Captain Hui. I won’t ask why one of your crew had a gun. Quite frankly, I don’t care. But I do want to know if I need to worry about anything else from you and your crew that might endanger me, my crew, or my ship.”

“Commander Stetson, please know that I am so sorry about what happened. I knew that Zhi had a gun with him on the trip. He was our—how do you say—political officer. But I did not know he had brought it with him from the lander to your ship. I believe we might have used it on ourselves had your ship not come to our rescue.”

Stetson looked around the empty Altair and out the hole in her side. He could see the constellation Orion as plain as he ever had. That’s fitting, he thought. “I never imagined my trip to the Moon would be anything like this.”

“Nor did I.”

“It’ll go in the history books.” Stetson could see the concern and slight smile on Hui’s face.

“In ours, too.”