FIRSTFLIGHT
Nicole Shea 01
By
Chris Claremont
This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously published.
FIRSTFLIGHT
An Ace Book/published by arrangement with the author
Ace edition/December 1987
Copyright © 1981, 1987
by C.S. Claremont.
Cover art by Royo.
ISBN: 0-441-23584-0
Ace Books are published by
The Berkley Publishing Group
200 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016.
Printed In The USA
Acknowledgments
To GB—who bought the silly thing!
And to Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt, Sean, Kitty, Rogue, Betsy, Alex, Ah—and all the rest—who helped (and help) pay the rent!
To my Folks And my Sister Sue (Who finally got herself mentioned in a book!)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter One
A hundred kilometers ahead of them, invisible in the darkness, Hightower swung serenely around the Earth, following a celestial path as old and well-worn as the planet itself. Nicole knew the giant L-5 station was there—her instruments told her so, both the massed scanscreens and telltales that crowded the main control panel and the head-up displays projected onto the canopy directly in front of her—she just wished she could see it. The distance was close to an hour's drive in her car, half that flying her Beech; today, she'd cover it in a matter of minutes.
"O'Neill Approach Control," she said, automatically checking the instruments and trying not to sound as bored as she felt, "this is NASA shuttle one-two-one, out of Kennedy Space Center, vectoring onto Final."
"One-two-one," a voice crackled in her ears, "this is O'Neill Control, standing for course update."
"We copy, O'Neill," Nicole acknowledged. "One-two-one standing by." She looked over at her co-pilot, Paul DaCuhna—like her—a brand-new Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, and asked for a status report.
"Couldn't be better, boss," he said cheerily. "That last correction was perfectemundo, and all on-board systems register nominal function."
"Except for my fucking air lines," she muttered, in her seat and wishing she weren't encumbered by the bulky pressure suit. They'd been in full gear for three days straight, ever since lift-off, not even allowed to remove gloves and helmets, except in an emergency, which this certainly was, since a blocked hose junction had cut off her flow of oxygen. She hadn't realized how bad she smelled until she cracked the seal ring on her helmet and took her first breath of cabin air. She pitied anyone standing nearby when she removed the entire suit; this stench was murder. The realization that Paul was probably equally ripe didn't help much, and the longer her helmet was off, the more rotten she felt, painfully conscious now of an itch down towards the base of her spine where—of course—she couldn't scratch. Wiggling in her chair only made things worse. She was ready to kill for a decent bath, or a wash of any kind—and as if that wasn't torment enough, ever since breakfast she'd found herself gripped by an irrational yen for a double-dip hot fudge sundae buried under a mountain of walnuts, cherries and whipped cream. Just thinking about it was more than she could bear.
She turned on the master switch, and grinned triumphantly as she was rewarded with a faint hiss from the hose held in her hand and a rush of cool air against her face. A moment later, the umbilical was locked back on to her suit.
"That's better," she said, mostly to herself, rubbing her eyes and wishing the flight would hurry up and end so she could return to at least a semblance of humanity. She felt far more weary than she'd expected—this last day it had taken an effort to focus her thoughts—and she realized that it was mostly due to boredom. Nothing much had happened once they'd cleared the relatively crowded traffic lanes in low earth orbit. The computers ran the ship; she and Paul merely sat and slept and watched the consoles, which dutifully told them everything was fine. She didn't know how the regular shuttle crews stood it, she figured she was lucky to last this one flight without going stir-crazy.
"Better put your helmet on, boss," Paul said. "Remember the rules."
"In a minute," she told him, while thinking: screw the rules. She knew she was indulging herself and, this once, didn't care; she was feeling halfway decent for the first time in days. "They're taking their bloody time with that callback. Paul, gimme our speed and range to the station."
"Forward velocity, 170 meters per second, constant; negative lateral velocity. Range to station, ninety-five kay and closing. All on-board systems still read A-OK."
" 'A-OK'?"
"Vintage, boss—like me."
She snorted, but couldn't resist a smile. They'd known each other for six years, as classmates, friends—and for a short while, lovers—and he'd long ago learned which of her buttons to push and when. She reached for her helmet.
"One-two-one, O'Neill." The urgency underlying the controller's professionally calm tone froze Nicole and brought her fully alert. "We register a slight deviation from flight path, a positive yaw of point-two-seven meters per second. Please correct, over."
"We copy, O'Neill; stand by. Paul—?"
He shook his head. "My screens say nothing's wrong. We should have no drift."
"You think they're lying to us? Punch up a tight-scan course display."
The big 35-centimeter screen centered on the main panel between them flared to life, the shuttle's computers painting the schematics of their approach in brilliant strokes of light and color. Alongside the diagram, a constantly shifting array of numbers and letter codes indicated the myriad aspects of their progress.
A glance told Nicole the O'Neill controller was right. "I knew things were too damn good to be true," she told Paul. "Check the engineering systems and run a test sequence on the Command Auto-Pilot; it should have compensated long ago. Better include the primary fault monitors as well. I'll plot the correction." She reached again for her helmet, half listening to Paul's background commentary.
"I can't account for the drift, Nicole. The engines are shut down, we're flying a ballistic trajectory—whoa! I've got something! We're losing pressure in propellant tank number three."
Even as he spoke, the full implications of his words struck them both. That tank was part of the network supplying the shuttle's OMS—their Orbital Maneuvering System. As one, their hands leapt for the EMERGENCY JETTISON switches outlined in red candy stripes on the ceiling instrument panel. They never made it.
There was a terrific bang from behind them, and their world turned upside down.
Nicole had loosened her shoulder harness to work on her jammed umbilical, so that when the explosion came she found herself thrown forward into the control panel. At the same time, her helmet caromed off her face—she couldn't hold back a sharp cry of pain—and disappeared towards the rear of the flight deck. There was a sudden salt taste in her mouth—she'd bitten her lip—and her nose was bleeding as well; she hoped it wasn't broken. Serve her right. Around her, everything not fastened down was bouncing through the cabin as the shuttle spun out of control. On the main panel, telltales were already flashing orange, the savage torque quickly pushing systems and spacecraft to their limits.
Nicole found herself totally disoriented, seeing black, star-flecked sky through the canopy one instant, the Ear
th the next, only to be flash-blinded by the Sun an instant after that. She was dimly aware of someone calling on the radio, but she shut the voice out of her mind, breathing a silent prayer of thanks for the years she'd spent as a child, sailing the Atlantic in all kinds of weather; she'd long ago developed a cast-iron stomach. She worried, though, about how Paul was doing; he'd be in rough shape if he threw up inside his helmet.
Bracing her feet against the panel, she shoved herself back into her chair. While one hand tightened her harness, the other ripped the safety shield off the JETTISON rack. She flipped the arming studs, then pressed the trigger. Again, there was a loud bang from aft. A quick look at the instruments told her the explosive bolts had blown the tank free.
"Paul!" she yelled, her co-pilot wincing as the words boomed into his ears. "Full power! RCS thrusters one, three and five!"
He activated the firing switches, then slapped the throttles all the way forward, the cabin vibrating as the small attitude control rockets gradually slowed the shuttle's madcap spin.
"Range to station, eighty-one kay and closing," he reported. "Forward velocity, 250 meters per second, with a positive Delta-Vee. Estimated contact with Hightower: 5.4 minutes. Spacecraft attitude, nose down, forty-one degrees negative pitch."
Nicole tried to speak, only to have her voice choked off by a coughing fit; her throat felt like she'd been swallowing sand. She could sense herself inexorably driven towards panic. Events seemed to be racing beyond her control. Part of her was terrified, screaming that time was running out, that she had to hurry up and do something—do anything—or the shuttle was doomed.
Yet she refused. She took a couple of slow, deep, deliberate breaths, and a swallow of water from the dispenser built into her suit. She knew things were serious, but training, and an instinct she was just beginning to realize she possessed, told her to stay calm.
"Auto-pilot?" she asked, surprised to hear how steady her voice was. "Computer Docking System."
"Both dysfunctional. You okay?" Paul made no attempt to hide his concern.
"Disengage. Shift controls to Manual. I'll live." She pressed the heel of her hand against her nose and sniffed hard to make the blood clot faster. Some droplets floated past and away from her face, making her wonder what she looked like to Paul. Probably awful. She twisted around as far as she could, trying for a glimpse of where her helmet had flown, but she couldn't see it.
"One-two-one, O'Neill. We mark a serious deviation from your flight path...."
"No shit."
"Shut up, Paolo," Nicole snapped. "We had a blowout in an OMS fuel cell, O'Neill; I'm aborting our approach and declaring an emergency. Please notify all local traffic and alert rescue units."
"O'Neill copies, One-two-one, anything we can do?"
"Yeah," Paul muttered, "save our ass." To Nicole, he asked, "What now, boss?"
She sighed, irrationally wanting to yank off her communications carrier and scrub her fingers through her close-cropped hair; she did that when she was nervous and trying to settle her thoughts. "The best we better hope for is a clean miss of the station, by as wide a margin as possible. After that, it's simply a matter of buttoning up and sitting tight until the tugs rendezvous with us."
"We don't have all that much time."
"I'm aware of that. Plot us a gentle vector into a high Terrestrial orbit. The starboard engine's out, but the port looks okay; I'm going to swing us through another quarter-turn so that our tail's facing Hightower, then kick in full thrust... "
"D'you think that's wise?"
"We've got good separation. Our exhaust gasses won't even scorch its skin, much less cause a rupture. The time to worry about the Wheel, Paolo, is when we can see it."
Nicole called Approach Control and briefed them as quickly and concisely as she could.
"I'll work the thrusters," she told Paul after O'Neill had approved the plan, "you monitor the boards."
"Gotcha. Four minutes to impact."
"Hang on, hotshot—here we go."
Nicole curled a hand around the pistol grip of the control column and fired the attitude rockets. "I hate to noodge," Paul said, "but you sure you don't want to speed things up?"
"No hurry. Look at the telemetry—even at ten-percent thrust, we're getting some dangerous stress readings aft. We push too hard and this bucket could tear apart on us."
"Coming up on forty degrees of arc."
"I see it. Prime the OMS, I'm initiating retrofire—now!"
Without warning, there was a tremendous explosion. Nicole threw her hands up to protect her face as the rear bulkhead of the flight deck blew out.
"Explosive decompression!" Paul screamed. The two of them were instantly enveloped in a blizzard of loose debris mixed with chafflike snow as the murderous cold of space condensed and froze the water in the shuttle's atmosphere. Nicole yelped, more in surprise than pain, as a clipboard bounced off her forearms, snarled at her own frailty, then clawed at harness and umbilicals, yanking everything loose and letting the wind take her. She had to reach her helmet and don it before this freak hurricane voided all the air in the cabin; otherwise, she was dead. Paul was watching, eyes wide with fear for her. He didn't think she'd make it and it was killing him that there was nothing he could do to help. He was saying something—probably cursing her stupidity, which was fine with her, she was doing a fair amount of that herself—but she couldn't hear him, she'd broken their comlink when she disconnected her umbilicals. She saw the helmet wedged against a partially ruptured view port back at the aft crew station—her eyes were beginning to burn as their tears were chilled to freezing, she'd be blind in seconds—and threw herself at it. Her hand closed on the seal ring and she braced herself against the bulkhead while she slapped the helmet on her head and locked it into place. Despite the punishment it had taken, she couldn't see even a scratch; the GEC Lexan was like transparent steel, virtually nothing could damage it.
She wasn't safe yet; there was precious little air left in her lungs, none in her suit, she had to reconnect her umbilicals. She caught a ceiling handhold. All she had to do was hold on until the flight deck air pressure dropped to zero and simply pull herself back to her seat. Then, impossibly, she felt the wall under her back give way. Nicole began to slip through the gap. She cried out, desperately clenching her fingers as tight as she could, eyes widening as her body was twisted around and she found herself looking into the cargo bay. Normally, in transit, the bay doors were opened; now, one was completely gone, ripped off its hinges, while the other, anchored to the shuttle, was wrapping itself around the vertical stabilizer. She levered her head and shoulders back inside and, her last breath misting the inside of her helmet, thought she saw Paul reaching out to her. She managed to wrap both hands around the handhold but that was as far as she could go; the wind wouldn't let up, she had no more strength, there was fire in her chest and her mouth gaped in a frantic struggle for air that wasn't there. She was beaten, no question about it, why deny the inevitable? No, she screamed silently—godddammit, no!—and heaved herself forward, lunging for DaCuhna's outstretched arm. At the same time, the hurricane finally came to an end, so that she shot past him to crash upside down into the console and canopy.
"How the hell did that happen?" Paul demanded furiously, locking Nicole's lines into her suit and settling her into her chair. "We're carrying cargo, not passengers; there should have been a vacuum in the bay! That was Earth-normal pressure, at least! And a helluva lot more exhaust than we had atmosphere in the cabin!"
"You're asking the wrong person, pal," Nicole told him between gasps, once she'd recovered enough to talk; she was drenched with sweat and her head pounded—but in her opinion she'd never felt better. "I'm as confused as you are. What's our status?"
"Lousy. You had a negative retrofire on the verniers. We're still spinning and still on a collision course with Hightower. A hundred seventy seconds to impact." He changed channels on the primary scanscreen. "We've suffered a major hull fracture from frames 38 to 5
1. Zero atmospheric pressure in the cargo bay, zero pascals on the flight deck. Port OMS still reads in the green." He turned towards Nicole. "Your plan's busted, boss. By the time we set up the right thrust vectors, assuming that's even possible anymore, we'll be too close."
She groped for coherent thoughts. "Okay, let's go for a miss. I'll try to cancel this damn spin, but you work on the assumption I can't. I want a firing window that'll punch us past the station."
"You sure you're up to it?" She gave him a look. "As good as done."
Precious seconds passed as the two young officers worked to save what remained of their crippled spacecraft. In her aching mind's eye, Nicole saw them crashing into the gleaming doughnut-shaped station, the shuttle's fuel cells exploding, fire cascading across Hightower's artificial sky. At the same time, kilometer-long cracks spread outward from their impact point, the pressure of the colony's atmosphere completing the job the collision had begun, shattering the torus and hurling people, livestock, buildings—the work of a lifetime—into oblivion.
Angrily, Nicole thrust the images away and entered the coordinates Paul read into the computer. With a final look at the main panel, she was about to fire when her arm was suddenly grabbed.
"Nicole, don't!" Paul cried. "Something's up!"
"What are you talking about?"
"The computer's numbers don't mesh right. I want to go over 'em again."
"Paul, there isn't time."
"Give me one more spin. Please, Nicole! I know what I'm talking about!"
Paul took a spin and a half to review the figures with his own personal PortaComp, cursing as his bulky suit gloves gave him trouble with the tiny keys.
"These are good, boss," he said finally, passing her the results. They were different from those plotted on the main screen. Without hesitation, Nicole changed the settings and, on his cue, pressed the firing stud.
First Flight Page 1