Stephen Coonts - Combat

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.

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.

******PROCEDURE VIOLATION******

TIME LIMIT EXCEEDED. SYSTEM RESET IN PROGRESS

******32:28:14******

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

“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.”