Orbital

Nineteen Interior

I flick on my helmet light and the interior of the CS is illuminated, revealing a chaotic mess of free-floating silver pouches, cables and densely packed machinery.

Although it’s only twenty feet from where I am to the front of the satellite, I can’t even see halfway into the chamber. It appears that some kind of container or cargo net ruptured.

“How’s the radiation?” asks Laney.

“Still yellow. A little more, but no orange.”

“Try to keep it under twenty minutes if you don’t want to grow another eye.”

“I thought we made progress with anti-radiation drugs?”

“Not that much.”

The satellite is divided into two halves with a mesh screen dividing them. The left side appears to be the equipment section filled with various machines. On the right is something of a passage that appears to go all the way to the nose section where the laser unit is housed.

I feel like I’m staring down the gullet of a mechanical great white shark that ate a junkyard.

“Heading into the CS. Are you getting video?”

“Yeah. Was this thing built by raccoons?” asks Laney.

“I think some kind of storage locker broke open.”

“Might have happened during the test fire. Things probably got very hot.”

I pull myself along on a railing, careful not to grab any cables that might be electrified.

There’s so much loose stuff in here; containers, more silver pouches, tools, I half expect to turn around and see Monster Matilda stalking me.

A package drifts by and the augmented display translates the label, “Shrimp Noodle Space Meal.”

“Sounds delicious,” says Laney.

“I guess the technicians decided to leave their lunch inside here.”

I reach my hand out to swat away some more silver pouches and my wrist gets tangled in a black netting.

“I think I found what snapped loose.”

I unwrap it from my arm and try to wedge it in between two metal boxes on the hull.

“Hey, Mongoose. Turn your head to the left. We want to take a look at something.”

I rotate around and glance through a partition in the mesh divider. On the opposite hull a spacesuit is fixed to the wall.

“That’s interesting. I guess they packed a backup in case they had to send someone to do a repair up here,” I reply.

“Should have sent a Roomba,” says Laney.

I close a panel door blocking the rest of the satellite and make my way towards the nose section.

A ring of sixteen cylinders surrounds a larger tube with hundreds of pipes going in an out of it.

“Russel says that’s it. How’s your radiation?”

“Getting more orange. Let’s make this a quick one.”

I take out my set of tools from my thigh pouch and start taking apart the housing as a technician back at Ops leads me through each step.

Working in micro-gravity is a challenge unto itself, being careful not to leave any evidence of tampering the Chinese can find later is another level of difficulty.

“Okay, I have the back plate off and I’m sliding out the tube section.”

I pull the bread box-sized unit towards me and open the inner compartment. Being extra, extra careful, I slide the rod from the tube filled with pumping emitters designed to excite the material into doing its magic thing.

Delicately, I reveal just enough of the Silver Glass to attach my pen-sized spectrometer. This is the device that can tell us precisely the chemical makeup of the material.

“Getting my reading now.”

The spectrometer flashes green.

“Okay, plugging the spectrometer into my wrist comm so you guys can read all the fancy numbers.”

The light on the back of my arm computer flashes blue as it sends the data back to Ops.

“Safe to reassemble?” I ask.

“Hold up, Mongoose. They’re still checking the data.”

“Okay. And I’m still a microwave burrito.”

“Mongoose, this is Onlooker. We need you to do an additional procedure.”

Ugh, that would be Kevin Flavor chiming in with his two cents.

“Go ahead, Onlooker.”

“We need you to replace the rod but affix a one centimeter piece of thermal tape to the underside.”

“You mean sabotage the device?”

There’s a long pause from back on Earth. To be honest, I suspected something like this was going to happen. Why just have me spy on the device if you can destroy it the next time they try to fire it up?

The thermal tape would provide enough of an imbalance in the laser chamber that it could cause the whole system melt down, ruining their space-laser — and probably set their program back months or years as they figure out what happened.

I’m kind of uncomfortable with this, but I’m kind of already knee deep.

“Just proceed, Mongoose,” says Flavor.

I put the tape back in my pouch and close the chamber. “Already done.”

A few seconds later he’ll see visual confirmation on the video feed if he has any doubt.

All that it really took to convince me was the memories of the nearly losing my heat shield and almost crashing a 777 because of space-based lasers.

“Good job, Mongoose,” says Flavor.

“Proceed to reassemble the unit,” adds Laney.

I painstakingly put all the parts back together as the techs back at Ops watch on and make certain I don’t do anything stupid, like leave a wrench inside the unit.

Fun fact, none of my tools or gear has any serial numbers, manufacturing marks or anything else to indicate where it came from. Not that this would fool the Chinese, but it makes it harder for them to go on international television and hold up a monkey wrench with “Made in the USA” stamped on it. Although, let’s be realistic, most of the tools I’m using were probably made in China.

“Unit is sealed. Heading back to the DarkStar.”

I turn around in the tight space and begin to make my way through the loose cables and debris filling the interior.

Halfway through, I come to a stop as my foot gets tangled in something.

“Ops, give me second. I’m a little caught up.”

“Make it fast. We don’t like the look of your radiation meter.”

I bend over and aim my helmet light at my leg, trying to figure out I’m snared in.

My heart stops when I see.

“Mongoose, your pulse rate is off the chart. Are you okay?”

No.

Definitely not.

I’m not wrapped up in a cable.

Someone is holding onto my ankle.