John Nance - Orbit

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.

So Sharon was right after all.

Kip thinks of little else. The hope that he might somehow remember how to blast himself back out of orbit and find a way to land seems beyond overwhelming. He looks at the pile of checklists in his lap, having read over several trying to get a mental image of the long litany of technical duties that he’ll have to perform at the right moment in the right way to direct the rocket motor in precisely the right direction to lose all that speed they gained.

He sighs, shaking his head at the image of himself getting tangled up in what switch to hit next. Even if, somehow, he gets it all right and everything works, he’ll then pop out in the lower troposphere and have an on-the-job learning experience trying to dead-stick an engineless spacecraft down to a runway somewhere without colliding with something hard and unforgiving.

No, Sharon is going to be right, he decides. But there is still the slightest glimmer in his mind that he could escape. A shred of hope, like believing your football team can somehow use the last five seconds of the game to Hail Mary their way through ninety yards of determined defenders to the winning touchdown.

Possible, yes. Probable, no.

Okay, most likely I’m going to die.

And the hell of it is, he can’t even call Sharon to apologize.

He looks at his watch, then at the Earthscape passing below. He’s in darkness now somewhere over the Pacific, wondering why he has to wait for three more orbits before trying to leave. Maybe he should plan to try the retrofire sequence at the end of the second orbit, instead of waiting for the third? Or would that bring him down in the wrong place? To fire it right now, for instance, would probably mean a very wet and fatal landing a thousand miles east of Hawaii.