Orbit

Chapter 6

The whine of jet engines filters into the stunned silence of the soundinsulated control room. Smoking has never been permitted here, but several occupants are wishing for an exemption. The level of tension is palpable.

Outside on the ramp, the Lockheed 1011 named Deliverance is returning to her parking spot, one hundred and fifty thousand pounds lighter—her missing appendage now halfway around the planet.

Video and audio feeds carry what’s happening inside the computer-rich mission control room, but the TV images are going only to the Internet and a bank of digital recorders, since no news organizations have requested them. With few exceptions, the world is neither watching nor listening.

Here the response to what at first seemed a momentary communications glitch has become disordered, adrift, the assembled professionals milling around like a troop of actors who’ve run off the end of their script. They stand and look back and forth, consulting their monitors and each other for answers to questions they’re having trouble even phrasing. Ultimately, all eyes migrate to one man.

Arleigh Kerr stands at the flight director’s console, searching the faces of the eighteen men and women arrayed before him for signs of deliverance. A veteran of the same sort of control room at NASA in Houston, his thinning hair and angular features on a six-foot frame are well known in spaceflight circles. An admirer of NASA’s unflappable Deke Slayton, Kerr is working hard now to find a way to stay the calm leader, the man with the answers—but he, too, is floundering.

Intrepid achieved exactly the orbit planned for it, and they all know exactly where the ship is at the moment. What they don’t know is why virtually every communications circuit in the ship could have failed simultaneously.

It’s like someone yanked a plug from the wall up there, he thinks to himself, embarrassed at the simplicity of the simile.

“Arleigh, we’re cued up on the rerun of the last thirty seconds of telemetry,” one of his engineers is saying in his ear.

“You have something?”

“Not sure. You want to punch it up on your monitor?”

He nods before remembering to reply.

“Yeah. Channel Twelve. Got it.”

“Okay, Arleigh, watch parameters forty-eight and ninety-six. I’ve highlighted them. Forty-eight is capsule atmospheric pressure. Ninety-six is internal structure vibration monitor.”

The graphed lines crawl across the screen in routine manner until one second before the communication link ends.

“There, Arleigh. See that? Pressure drop at the same moment we’ve got a loud vibration, like a noise in a multiple of frequencies.”

“I see it,” he says. “But what does it mean?”

“Stand by. We’re coming to you,” the engineer replies, and in a few seconds, four of them are arrayed around the flight director, their faces ashen.

“What? What?” Arleigh demands.

“We think we may have lost a pressure seal. Explosively. Pressure drop, vibration—probably a loud noise—then nothing.”

“But why no radios? Why no telemetry?” Arleigh asks, his irritation leaking into his resolve of steady leadership. “Even if we’ve lost Bill and his passenger, how can a blown seal have knocked out all communications? They don’t need to be… alive… for the telemetry to keep working.”

Glances are exchanged before their eyes return to him.

“The other possibility, Arleigh, is that we collided with something.”

The thought had haunted him.

“Collided with what? We did all the usual NORAD checks before launch and we’re live online with them right now for any space junk updates. There’s nothing out there.”

“That they know about,” one of the men corrects, looking sheepish and bracing for the defensive retort he expects.

But Arleigh feels already defeated. They’ve voiced the ultimate heresy: no routine or noncatastrophic explanation for losing all the comm circuits at once. The lump in his throat is growing.

“We have a handheld Iridium phone up there, right?” Arleigh asks. “We’ve checked it? We’ve called it?”

The Iridium satellite phone has its own battery. For a spacecraft, it’s a low-tech backup that should have worked if Bill Campbell had lost all other means of communicating.

“Yes, we called it,” is the reply. “And we checked with Iridium’s control center. There’s zero indication Bill has pulled it out. Which… may indicate he can’t.”

Arleigh Kerr surveys their faces, seeing they all share the same horrific vision. He turns to Ian McIver, another NASA veteran.

“See if you can get one of NASA’s high-powered cameras to look at him during the Australian transit. Let’s see if we can confirm Intrepid is intact.”

“I’ll have to scramble,” Ian says, already doing just that.

“And the rest of you rerun the tapes and see if there’s any indication of anything out of the ordinary before that last second. Some parameter going south we didn’t catch.”

“We’re getting NORAD involved to look at their debris tracks just before signal loss, too.”

“Good.”

“Arleigh, you are going to call general quarters, aren’t you? Bring in Mr. DiFazio?”

Arleigh is already nodding, the act of alerting the company’s chairman a painful call he made less than ten minutes ago.

“He’s out of bed and on the way.”

No point in discussing Intrepid’s inability to automatically take itself out of orbit. From the first they’ve taught their passengers in ground school how to do the deorbiting job themselves in the event an astronaut dies, but it was complicated and never supposed to be necessary, since all the commands can be sent by remote and Intrepid can even be flown down to a safe landing remotely. The arguments they’ve had over the terrible things that could go wrong with a civilian at the controls still haunt them, disasters like spinning off into deep space or thrusting into an immediately incinerated reentry, or managing to slow and descend only to crash on landing from lack of pilot skills. The argument for a minimum of two astronauts on each flight had even worried the Federal Aviation Administration—until Congress swatted the FAA and decided that the word “aviation” did not include the word “space.”

So the ability to remote-control everything aboard Intrepid was their ace in the hole, but an ability that depended on the communications links working. The idea that they could all go down at once is one nightmare they’d never fully faced.

And now?

Arleigh picks up the phone and punches in the cell number of ASA’s chairman and CEO, who is racing north from Lancaster in his car.

“Any change, Arleigh?” Richard DiFazio asks.

“No, sir. The bottom line is, we have zero communication, no ability to remote control, and no knowledge of whether either of our two people up there is conscious… or even alive.”

“Keep the lid on this. I’m ten minutes out.”

“We do need to ask NASA for help. I… already gave the order to do so.”

“Oh God! That will go straight to Geoff Shear.”

“Sir…”

“I know, I know. It’s okay. Do what you have to do.”

When the administrator of NASA calls an emergency meeting of his senior staff with outlying members suddenly yanked from their offices and piped in by video teleconference, the entire neural network of NASA begins to vibrate.

That pleases Geoff Shear.

He enters the conference room next to his office and sits surveying the faces around the table and those on screen from Houston and the Cape. There are several large liquid crystal screens on the far wall, each bearing the NASA logo, which now dissolve into various images.

“So ASA wants us to look at their spacecraft,” he begins. “Why? Are they in trouble?” Geoff is working to control his expression, keep it serious and concerned, but no one carrying a NASA badge in the Beltway is unaware of the personal war of Geoffrey Shear, and Providence has just handed him a gift he dare not acknowledge.

One of the managers at Johnson in Houston answers.

“Yes, sir. They’ve lost all their communications.”

“Telemetry, too?” Geoff asks.

“We can’t pick it up if anything’s coming down. All their comm links went dark as soon as they arrived on orbit.”

“Have we visually looked at them?”

Heads nod and there’s a sudden switch to a videotape of the spacecraft in flight, a fuzzy, indistinct image shot with an incredibly long lens from a ground station in western Australia.

“So what am I seeing?” Geoff asks, leaning forward.

“The craft appears intact, and we’re reading livable heat on the other side of the windows. That could be just the window heaters we’re detecting, but most likely she’s still pressurized and survivable. We don’t see any visible damage, but… there’s this.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Ed Rogers from Houston.”

The picture changes to a composite of black and white imagery and what appears to be a digital radar display.

“What am I looking at?” Shear demands.

The same voice responds.

“This is from NORAD’s array, just as ASA’s ship reached orbit. This is about a minute and a half after engine cutout. I’m going to go frame by frame here, because we have just two radar hits on what appears to be a very small object approaching very, very rapidly from in front of the craft, then one single radar hit of it on the backside, in a slightly different trajectory. At the same point, on the visual image, there’s a small burst of light that might indicate ejected debris aft of the capsule corresponding with the backside trajectory.”

“And in English, Dr. Rogers?”

“We think they got nailed by something NORAD wasn’t tracking.”

“And that’s where the radios went?”

“Sir, it apparently passed through the equipment bay of their ship, and God knows what damage it did, but knocking out virtually all their communications and their propulsion, control, and, eventually, even life support would not be an outlandish expectation.”

“Jesus!”

“Geoff, John Kent in Houston.” The voice of NASA’s chief astronaut, a former Air Force colonel, is not a welcome intrusion.

“Yeah, John.”

“We have Atlantis in the vehicle assembly building at the Cape and I can work up an emergency mission plan within an hour if you’d like.”

“Why, John?”

Silence fills the room and the circuits, a silence Geoff knows Colonel Kent will be unable to keep.

“If someone’s alive up there, we can’t just sit on our hands, can we?”

Geoff gets to his feet, his well-honed ability to put subordinates in their place virtually second nature.

“Thanks, everyone,” he says on the way out of the room, answering the question by default. He knows the effect on his staff, and he should thank Kent for the opportunity to once again demonstrate how an iron-ass leader wields his power. Those who press beyond the limits of what Geoff Shear wants to hear will be ignored and embarrassed.

Besides, he thinks darkly, Kent knows damn well what the policy is on rescuing privateers in space.