“This patch ought to work.” Stetson carefully removed the putty from the container and filled the hole. The remaining blood spheres slowly dispersed after the airflow out of the cabin stopped.
“Zhi is secure. How may I help?” asked Hui.
Stetson looked toward the Chinese captain and saw that she had not only securely bound the renegade engineer but had taped his mouth shut as well.
“Uh…” Stetson thought for a second. “Why don’t you answer the radio while I tend to the rest of the alerts? The headset is on the control panel.”
Hui moved out from her position on the upper deck toward the control panel, eased on the headset and activated the radio.
“This is Captain Hui, speaking for Captain Stetson. Umm, how may I be of assistance?”
Stetson had to laugh and then said, “I bet they didn’t expect her to answer.”
He moved to the control panel and positioned himself only a few inches from his Chinese counterpart as she described the violence that had transpired aboard the ship to the ground crew back in Texas.
Stetson looked at the myriad of ship-status alerts and slowly turned them off, one by one, until only a few orange lights remained. None of them were still red, which meant the ship was not in imminent danger.
“Captain Stetson, your mission controllers wish to speak with you.” Hui slipped the headset from her head and handed it to him.
Stetson declined the headset, switched the audio to the loudspeaker, and said, “This is Stetson.”
“Bill, we were more than a little surprised to hear Captain Hui answer our call. We’ve been trying to reach you for quite some time. She says that you have everything under control and that the hole in the floor is sealed. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“How is Dr. Xu?”
Stetson looked toward Tony and Xu. Though he was obviously in pain, Xu gave a thumbs-up sign. Tony, after only a brief moment of hesitation, also gave a thumbs-up.
“He’ll make it.”
“Glad to hear it.” The mission controller then hesitated before he said, “Bill, there’s another problem you need to know about. The hole that you patched probably pierced the heat shield. The patch you put in place will keep you from losing atmosphere, but it will never survive the heat of reentry. Our models indicate that the hole on the outside of the ship is probably two or three times larger than what you see on the inside. The energy of the bullet was mostly deposited in the outer skin. If you don’t patch it on the outside with the heat-shield repair kit, then you might not survive the aerocapture.”
“EVA?” Stetson said.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to. Are you up for it?”
“Well, I am certainly okay with going out, but I am not sure about what to do with the rest of my crew. Their suits are a mess. It’ll take us some time to clean them for reuse. How much time do I have before we have to jettison the lander and begin reentry procedures?” The lander was not designed to return home to Earth. Before the Orion made its final entry into the Earth’s atmosphere for the upcoming aerocapture maneuver, the lander would have to be jettisoned. The big kicker would be if they had time to get in their suits and to complete an EVA before the aerocapture procedures began.
“Six hours.”
Not much time, Stetson thought. Then he replied, “That’s plenty of time. Stetson out.”
“Okay, folks, we’ve got to get suited up quickly. I’ve got to go outside and play.”
“You have another patch kit?” Hui asked.
“Yes. After the Columbia accident back in 2003, NASA developed a technique for patching damage to the shuttle’s heat shields so that similar accidents could be prevented. The requirement applied to the Orion as well—here we are. The heat-shield patch kit is stored near the one I just used. Without it, that hole will allow hot gases inside the ship and act like a blowtorch. We would never survive that.”
It took twenty minutes to get the injured Dr. Xu into his suit. Another thirty-five to get the unconscious pilot back into his suit. At first Zhi acted as if he were going to refuse to put his suit on, so Hui asked Stetson to hold the pistol on him while she and Tony supervised his suiting up. They then proceeded to duct tape him back down. That took another thirty minutes.
Chow opened up a secure radio channel to Stetson. “Bill, can we repressurize the Orion while you are on the EVA so I can have access to my patients? If one of them were to need attention, I’d like to be able to get to them quickly.”
“I don’t see why not. That way you can monitor the ship and run through the checklists again also. We know the damage that was caused by one of the bullets, but not the other two. I’d rather find out now than during aerocapture. How is Dr. Xu, really?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood, and the bullet severed his fibula—one of the bones in the lower leg. He’s stable but in a lot of pain. He should be okay if we can get him to a hospital soon. Putting him back in the suit was very painful for him. I gave him some morphine.”
“Okay, we’ve got just a little more than five hours to fix the ship, get back in, and get ready for aerocapture,” Stetson said. “Everybody has masks down and is ready for depressurization. Then Hui and I go outside and look for the damage on the ship. Once we find the damage, she comes back inside while I do the repair. It’s a one-person job anyway. While I’m outside, you repressurize the cabin. When I want back in, you do it all again in reverse order. That’s the plan. Got it?”
“Got it, Bill.” Tony nodded.
Hui would look at the top portion of the ship while Bill looked at the underside. Stetson communicated over the suit radio to Hui.
“Captain Hui. I won’t ask why one of your crew had a gun. Quite frankly, I don’t care. But I do want to know if I need to worry about anything else from you and your crew that might endanger me, my crew, or my ship.”
“Commander Stetson, please know that I am so sorry about what happened. I knew that Zhi had a gun with him on the trip. He was our—how do you say—political officer. But I did not know he had brought it with him from the lander to your ship. I believe we might have used it on ourselves had your ship not come to our rescue.”
Stetson looked around the empty Altair and out the hole in her side. He could see the constellation Orion as plain as he ever had. That’s fitting, he thought. “I never imagined my trip to the Moon would be anything like this.”
“Nor did I.”
“It’ll go in the history books.” Stetson could see the concern and slight smile on Hui’s face.
“In ours, too.”
Chapter 28
“I have completely covered the upper portion of the ship’s hull and found no other holes,” Hui radioed to Stetson. “I am not sure where those other bullets went, but they did not penetrate the hull on the upper half.”
“That’s good news,” Bill replied. He had worked his way around the bottom half of the Orion twice and had found only the one major hole that he had already patched from the inside. “Something on the inside must’ve stopped the bullets, then. One of them likely being Dr. Xu’s leg.”
“Yes, you are most likely correct on that one,” Hui agreed. “I can work my way down to you and offer a hand.”
The damage assessment done, Hui offered once again to stay outside and help, but Bill patted the kit attached to his side and smiled.
“You go on and get back inside. I can handle this.” He motioned for her to go back into the Orion so they could close the main hatch.
“Very well, Captain.” She complied reluctantly, as far as he could tell.
Stetson watched as she made her way back to and then through the hatch. Once Tony had assured him that she was safely back inside and that the hatch was closed, he was ready to begin making the repair.
Outside and on the bottom of the Orion he studied the hole in the heat shield. Bill found the damage just below the handholds he’d used on the previous EVA, and he was now in a position to repair the damaged h
eat shield. Looking momentarily out into space, he could see the beautiful blue planet that was the Earth looming ahead of them. Stetson thought of his wife and children back home worrying about him, and he felt guilty. He was sure they now knew about the shooting, and he didn’t like the fact that in addition to all the fears that were normal when an astronaut went into space, they would now have to worry about a crazy person shooting him.
Pulling himself back to the present, he continued moving around the periphery of the hole on the bottom of the Orion. The damage from the bullet was obvious. In the otherwise perfectly smooth dark gray surface of the heat shield was a jagged hole at least three inches in diameter. He hoped the patch kit worked as planned.
“Houston, I see the damage. Can you see it with the suit camera?”
“Bill, we see it. It looks nasty from here. Can you repair it?”
“I think so. But it will use up the kit.”
“Understood. Our engineers here agree.”
“Stetson out.”
Bill then used a clip to fasten his tether to an anchor point close to where he needed to make the repair so that he would not waste valuable time inadvertently floating away.
In the Orion, the air pressure was restored. Chow maneuvered through the cabin and toward the primary control panel, noting that there were still far too many orange alerts.
“Interesting.” Hui popped her faceshield up and scanned the control panels. “Dr. Chow, what do all the orange indicators mean?”
“Well, uh, hmm…” Chow wasn’t one hundred percent certain himself, so he took a closer look. “Those are systems the computer has flagged as being not quite right or in need of monitoring by the crew. They would be red if there was a serious malfunction. Orange just means that they need checking and monitoring. Personally, I like green.”
“Green is a nice color.” Hui smiled.
Chow began checking each system just as he had been trained while Hui watched the video feed from Stetson’s spacesuit as he repaired the damage caused by the bullet piercing the ship’s heat shield. Chow occasionally glanced up from his work to note Stetson’s progress as well.
Repairing the damage took Stetson a little over an hour. It wasn’t as simple as taking a caulking gun and squirting goop into the hole and letting it dry. Back in the space shuttle days, it was discovered that leaving a “bump” on the surface of the heat shield that protruded more than three millimeters above the surface could cause extreme frictional forces that would rip the patch right off or cause it to superheat and therefore burn off. The heat shield on the Orion was a bit more forgiving, as it was a reentry capsule and not a flying surface, but the models had shown that large bumps on the surface would increase the heating and might be detrimental to the patch materials. In other words, rough patch jobs could be bad. Bill did his best to be meticulous about the process, but it wasn’t easy in an EVA suit with those bulky gloves. On more than three occasions during the patching process, he cursed the spacesuit designers and muttered that mankind would never make it to Mars if they didn’t invent a better suit.
“Tony, this is Bill.” Stetson’s voice came over the ship-to-ship radio channel.
“Bill, this is Tony. Go ahead.”
“I’ve done all I can do out here. According to my watch, we haven’t got that long before we have to jettison the Altair and start our aerocapture checklists and procedures. I’m on my way in.”
“Okay, Bill. I’ll get everybody faceshields down and buttoned up so we can depressurize and get you back inside.”
“Roger that. I’ll just hang out here until you give me the word.”
“Got it. Preparing to cycle the hatch.”
Turning away from the control panel, Chow motioned for Captain Hui to button up and help Bill.
He followed Hui to the hatch and showed her how to open it once the depressurization was complete. With his spacesuit donned, and confident that Hui could handle opening a hatch, Chow turned back to the command console and rapidly completed the checklist. He had just initiated the cabin depressurization when one of the many orange warning lights turned bright red. Chow noted the warning and touched the screen to bring up more information about the alarm. He didn’t like what he read.
He went back to the beginning of the depressurization sequence and began again—much more rapidly this time. The result was the same. The red warning light remained stubbornly lit, and the cabin did not depressurize.
Chow was beginning to sweat in his suit, and his heart rate began to rise. No, no, no, this can’t happen now! he thought to himself.
“Bill, this is Tony. We’ve got another problem.”
“Our luck, huh?” Stetson replied. “I was starting to wonder. I’ve been at the door for a few minutes waiting on you to open her up. What’s the problem?”
“I can’t open the door. I started the depressurization sequence, and then the status board lit up like a Christmas tree. I’ve been through it twice now, and all I can tell from the fault tree is that we can’t depressurize to let you in. I don’t know if the problem is mechanical or if it’s just a sensor somewhere.”
“How much time do we have before you have to separate from the lander?”
“A little more than an hour.”
“Well, that’s just great. I sure as hell don’t want to ride out an aerocapture from here.”
“Bill, unless we get this door open within the next thirty minutes or so, you won’t be able to come inside at all.”
Chow activated the voice link to mission control and brought them into the discussion, hoping against hope that one of the many NASA engineers would come up with something that would allow them to bring his friend inside before it was too late.
Chow ran through the entire procedure one more time with the same result—the red light would simply not go away.
“Houston, there has to be something else we can try,” Tony said and tried not to sound desperate.
“Okay, Mercy I. We’ve got another fix we want you to give a go.”
“Roger that, Houston. Let’s have it.” Tony had high hopes that the engineers back at NASA would figure this out. They always did.
“It looks like we’ve got several circuits interrupted, probably due to damaged systems, but, nonetheless, we aren’t going to trick the computers to depressurize the cabin. So, what we need to try is to cycle the inner docking hatch of the Orion. And then blow the Altair hatch out.”
“Can we do that with the Altair attached to the Orion?” Bill interjected.
“No, Bill, we can’t. So, we’ll have to attempt this when we jettison the Altair for the aerocapture maneuver. The timeline will be tight,” Houston responded.
“Hang in there, Bill. We’ll start prepping for this procedure.” Tony did his best to assure his commander, but he wasn’t all that confident himself.
“Tony,” Hui said vocally and not through the radio. “If the computer will not let us open the hatch because we’re not depressurized, then why will it let us undock the Altair?”
“The engineers down at Houston want us to give it a try. And, frankly, I’m not giving up on Bill without trying something.”
“Understood. Whatever I can do to help, just let me know.” Hui nodded sincerely at Tony, but he could see the concern, fear, and lack of optimism in her face.
“Bill, this is Tony. I’ve got to start the entry procedure checklists, and the engineers have a mile-long sequence of breaker flipping that I have to do before we undock.”
“Roger that, Tony. Do what needs to be done.” Stetson, not sounding at all like a man who had just been handed a death sentence, added, “Tony, one more thing I want you to understand.”
“What’s that, Bill?”
“No matter what happens out here, our first obligation is to get this crew and this ship safely home. Understood?”
“Understood.” Tony didn’t like the sound of that.
“Good. Get to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ch
apter 29
The mood in the Orion was morose. With two crewmembers injured, one incapacitated, and another trapped outside the ship, Anthony Chow was in command, and he didn’t like it. At least he wasn’t stranded on the surface of the Moon and left to die, as had been his biggest fear right up until they had actually left the Moon. Now, who knew? The likelihood of the aerocapture maneuver failing was pretty high, but Tony never had any fear of that part of the mission. Besides, he had way too many things going on to let his mind dwell on such negative things.
The Altair was about to be separated from the Orion on schedule, and they were less than two hours away from entering the outer portion of the Earth’s atmosphere. Chow was putting all his faith in those wizard engineers back home in mission control to come up with a magic spell that would save his ship’s captain, his friend. And that magic spell was a tedious one. It had taken him more than fifteen minutes of changing commands, throwing toggles, tapping icons, and physically flipping switches.
“That’s the last breaker. Check!” Tony reported.
“Roger that, Mercy I. Now, we need to do all this in very rapid secession, so make certain Bill is in the safe location and be prepared for rapid depressurization.”
“Roger that.” Tony looked around the cabin and saw that everybody was strapped in or tied off to something. “Bill, are you clear out there?”
“Roger that, Tony. I’m in the predetermined safe spot. It’s just me and my old solar-panel buddy out here. Let’s get on with this.”
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