by Homer Hickam
O Jehovah, our Lord, how glorious is thy name in all the earth! Thou hast displayed Thy majesty above the heavens.
When I observe Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established:
What is man that Thou are mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou carest for him?
Yet Thou hast made him little less than heavenly beings, and Thou dost crown him with glory and honor.
Medaris released the tethered book—Penny assumed it was a Bible—and held the foot of the sleeping bag with one hand while saluting with the other. “Into Your hands,” Penny heard him say, “I commit the spirit of Colonel Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, a father, an American, a patriot.”
Moved by his words, Penny watched Medaris push Cassidy into space, tipping the bag as he did. The bag, now a burial shroud, started tumbling end over end until it had become little more than a speck against the white-and-blue planet far below. Medaris gathered up the Bible and made his way back down the sill. Penny found that her heart was pounding. As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, she was frightened of the man in the suit coming her way. There was much she found appealing about him—he’d been gentle with her, after all, while she had tried to interfere with the systems activation, and Paco liked him, that was always a good sign when a cat took to a man—but that scar, and the way he could get so gruff with her. . . Of course, the way he and she had verbally barraged each other yesterday—that had been fun, she had to admit. Perhaps dangerous fun, she thought, turning it around. Medaris was, after all, some sort of master criminal, a shuttle spacejacker. She liked that term: spacejacker. It would look good in her book if she lived long enough to write it. She thought again of the Demerol and other drugs she’d hidden away. She should have used them. Maybe it wasn’t too late. When the spacejacker came through the hatch of the airlock, he’d be vulnerable.
Penny, still not certain what she was going to do, descended through the open hatchway to the middeck. The middeck was essentially nothing but an aluminum box smaller than one of the walk-in closets at her leased house in Malibu. Forward was a wall of white stowage lockers. The starboard wall held sleeping bags and the minuscule galley. Aft, there was a cylindrical airlock. She remembered its purpose: to seal off an astronaut going outside, allowing the air within to be evacuated without affecting the other astronauts in the main cabin. Beside the airlock, behind a plastic curtain, was the WCS. The entrance hatch, which had a small porthole, was dogged to the port wall. Rumor had it the toilet got smelly after a day or two. Penny could only hope they wouldn’t be in orbit long enough for that to happen.
Virgil was out of his sleeping bag and at the galley, his back to her. Then the airlock opened and Medaris, dressed in shorts and a rugby shirt, came through it. Behind him the suit he had doffed floated eerily, legs and arms quivering as if it were alive. He saw Penny. “Feeling better?”
Penny didn’t think his query sounded sincere. She studied him for a moment. “I saw and heard what you did. It was beautifully done, I must admit.”
He nodded, his face grim. “The Psalms are always appropriate.”
Virgil approached her, holding a plastic bottle. Penny saw that he looked almost human again, the SAS apparently dispelled. “Mornin’, ma’am,” he greeted her in a voice laden with respect. “Got some coffee ready for you.” He handed her the squeeze bottle. “Sorry it ain’t any hotter. They got it regulated so it won’t melt the plastic.”
Hot or not, Penny took the coffee greedily and carried it with her even though she was headed for the toilet. When she came out, Medaris had gone up to the flight deck. Starving, she hooked a foot in a foot loop and dug into the scrambled eggs and ham slices Virgil handed to her on a cellophane-covered plastic tray. He busied himself at the galley, cleaning up. She watched his wide back as he wiped down the rehydrator with a sponge. There seemed to be no harm in the man whatever. “Virgil...”
He turned eagerly. “Yes, ma’am? Ma’am, I’m really sorry about all this. My little girl—well, I’m a pad rat, ma’am, or I used to be before I started to work for Jack. We all lost our jobs and Lori, that’s my wife, was crazy worried about Dawn—my daughter has cystic fibrosis, ma’am—but Jack’s taken care of everything for us. And then he needed me for this mission. I had to come along. Now, ma’am, I need to tell you something else....”
Penny listened in astonishment at the torrent of information. “Slow down, Virgil,” she said, “take a breath.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He hung listlessly from the galley handrail and then rubbed his haggard face. “Whew! I’m still beat!” A look came over his face and Penny realized his SAS was far from over. He grabbed a plastic bag and headed for the WCS.
She felt a rush of empathy. For a spacejacker and master criminal Virgil seemed, well, nice. After polishing off another package of eggs and ham, doing her best to ignore the gagging sounds emanating from the toilet—there was no privacy on this grunge bucket— Penny went to the flight deck. Medaris was at the view ports that looked down the cargo bay. She remembered enough from her training to recognize that his hand was on the joystick for the shuttle arm. She hooked a footloop beside him. He gripped the pistol joystick and ordered the arm up and out, at the same time rotating open the end effector, a cylindrical cage that could grasp a special probe by tightening a triangle of cable around it. The arm rose slowly as he tested it, bending at the elbow and then at the wrist, silhouetted against the blue earth rushing below.
“How do you know how to do that?” she asked, astonished.
“I helped design the RMS.”
Penny stared at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“There it is!” Medaris announced suddenly. “Look at her! Perfect! One little RCS burn and I’ll have us snugged up.”
“RMS, RCS?” Penny questioned resignedly.
Medaris turned to a gray laptop bolted to a control panel and keyed in some numbers. “Remote manipulating system, reaction control system,” he said without looking at Penny. After a few seconds she felt Columbia tremble, then begin to rotate.
To Penny it appeared that the earth was actually doing the rotating, an optical illusion that not only made her dizzy but had the entire planet turning away from the cargo bay, leaving her to face the deep black velvet of empty space. Except it wasn’t empty. Something big floated down toward the cargo bay centerline, a giant cylinder wrapped partially in gold foil. On the side nearest Columbia she could see what she recognized from some NASA manual she’d read as a grapple fixture, a knobbed stalk on a circular plate. Whatever it was, it had been designed to be captured by the shuttle’s arm—or RMS, she thought. God, I’m starting to understand this stuff!
“Come to Papa,” Medaris breathed.
Penny watched as the arm moved toward the satellite’s grapple. The end effector swallowed it and the RMS folded back on itself under his steady hand. After it was about ten feet over the cargo bay, he shut the arm down.
“What is that thing?” Penny asked, trying not to sound as awestruck as she felt.
Jack tidied up the RMS, locking it into place. “Two stacked rocket engines. I’m going to remove the shuttle mains and put one of those, the big one, in their place.”
“Why—why would you do that?”
“Because the mains are no good to us now. And because we need the new engine for our experiments.”
“You’re going to get us killed, aren’t you?” she said in a burst of comprehending clarity.
He didn’t even bother to look at her, just kept diddling with the damn computer. “No, High Eagle, I’m going to do what my contract stipulates.”
She impulsively grabbed his hand, stopped him from keying anything else into the keyboard. “I crave the moment when I am allowed to see that sacred document.”
Medaris pried her hand off. “It might be on board here somewhere. I’ll ask Virgil to find it for you.”
Then he smiled and Penny decided it was a handsome smile, a bit too cocky, but r
eally quite nice. She hated him for it.
SMC, JSC
Houston was still on the job, quietly monitoring Columbia. After the Air Force, busy with its own plans, had stopped updating the ground track on Columbia, Tate’s Turds had reverted to their own devices, using the shuttle’s S-band hemiantennas for line-of-sight location fixes. Every time Columbia came over the horizon near a fixed NASA ground station, they had her. That was why, when Columbia shifted her orbit, Sam was informed by the GUIDO controller. “Update the track,” he ordered. As he watched, the big wall screen on the front left of the control room presented the new orbital graphic. “Not much of a mod,” he mused.
“They activated the Ku-band radar during the last pass,” the INCO controller said. INCO handled instruments and communications.
“And the RMS is powered up,” EECOM chimed in. EECOM managed the electrical systems.
“How do you know?”
“Normal traffic,” both controllers answered in unison.
Sam leaned back in his bent chair and absently adjusted his headset. “Normal traffic,” he said to himself, though aloud.
“What do you think that means?” Crowder said from the chair beside him.
“It means either these guys don’t care if we get health and status or they don’t know how to turn it off. And I would bet against the latter.”
“They want us to know what they’re doing?”
“Maybe they want us to help them out, if it comes to that,” Sam mused. “That makes sense. They can’t watch everything. Maybe they’re hoping we’ll do our jobs just as in any flight. No skin off their tails if we do.”
Crowder thought about it for a moment. “So we’re helping them just by monitoring their systems?”
The anger Sam had felt the day before had dissipated. “She’s our old Columbia. We’ll watch over her.” He keyed his headset mike. “How about it, INCO? What’s going on with Columbia ’s radar?”
“They swiveled the Ku-band dish a few minutes ago,” she answered. “Pulse wave readings would indicate they got a positive lock on something.”
“Can you tell what it is?”
“Negative, Flight.”
“Keep me advised.”
“Roger that.”
“Flight? This is FIDO.”
FIDO, flight dynamics. “Go, FIDO.”
“Columbia just made an RCS burn.”
Columbia was using her radar and now she was maneuvering. A rendezvous situation. That was a damned dangerous thing even with the assistance of Shuttle Mission Control.
“Sam,” a familiar voice over his headset crackled, “this is Owen Parker. Got a minute?” Parker was one of the payload operations directors, a POD in the Payload Operations Control Center up in Huntsville.
“Go, POD.”
“We show all the experiments on board with downlink still inactive except for three. We got green lights for FLEA, CELL, and SAREX.”
Sam searched his memory. He rarely cared what kind of experiments were on board. They were Huntsville’s problem. FLEA was an experiment that included a cat and had something to do with vestibular research—how zero g affected balance or some nonsense like that. CELL was. . . wasn’t that Dr. High Eagle’s experiment? SAREX was one he knew about, a shortwave radio that had flown on a lot of missions. Still, who the hell cared about any of them at a time like this? “Okay, POD,” he said, mildly irritated at the interruption. “Thanks for the update.”
“Something else too. I’ve been listening to the playback of yesterday’s launch. I think I recognize the voice of one of them. . . the hijackers.”
Now Sam was interested. After the POD had told him his suspicions, he cursed himself inwardly. Hell, he knew that voice too! “CAPCOM, this is Flight Director, my loop.”
“Go, Flight.” It was Jay Guidon. A rookie astronaut, known more for his computational skills than his ability to communicate.
“Jay, I’m going to play CAPCOM and see if I can raise Columbia,” Sam said.
“Roger, Flight,” Guidon replied dutifully.
“What are you doing, Sam?” Crowder asked.
“Relax, Jim, I’ll take the heat,” Sam said, and took a deep breath.
“Columbia, Houston. This is Sam Tate.” He waited, hearing only a hiss of static in his earpiece. “Come on, Jack. Answer me, boy!”
THE CONTRACT
FBI Office, the Old Post Office Building, Tallahassee, Florida
Cecil stared at the hard-faced FBI agents across the table. He ran a hand through his disheveled red hair. Because of his hair and the sprinkle of freckles he still had across his nose, his grade school buddies had nicknamed him Howdy Doody. Howdy Doody versus the FBI, Cecil thought, nearly giddy because of his lack of sleep. He chuckled inadvertently, much to the consternation of the agents who, he was certain, saw nothing funny about his situation. Through most of the night they had harangued him, then put him up at a nearby cheap hotel only to drag him out at the crack of dawn to question him some more. He’d caught a glimpse of the morning papers in front of the hotel. SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA HIJACKED was one of the headlines. The television news shows were all about the shuttle too, even though none of the reporters had any details to report. NASA, the Air Force, the administration, nobody in the government was talking. Cecil was certain that other FBI agents were descending on Cedar Key to search for any MEC employees still around and to rip through the plant at the airport for clues. He was also certain they would find nothing.
“You wrote this contract?” the lead agent, a gray-bearded black man, asked or, rather, accused.
“I did, Agent. . . ?”
“Fisk. Why did you do it, Velocci?”
“Why? Because it was my job.”
Fisk slapped his hand on the table, causing Cecil to jump. “You think that’s going to keep you from going to prison? That you wrote this—this travesty because it was your job? Was it your job to help perpetrate one of the crimes of the century?”
Cecil composed himself. “Crime? I don’t know of any crime.”
“Read it, Burrows.”
George Burrows was the FBI attorney. He read from a sheet of paper he’d been caressing on the table. Crossing a state line to commit a felony, kidnapping, skyjacking—
“Skyjacking? That law applies only to aircraft,” Cecil interrupted.
“The shuttle is an aircraft,” Burrows replied.
“I heard it was a spaceship.”
“As long as it’s in the atmosphere for part of its flight, it’s an aircraft,” Fisk growled. “Go on, Burrows.”
“Unauthorized use of government property—”
“MEC has a contract to use government property.”
“You’re going to piss me off, Velocci!” Fisk yelled.
“Dangerous entrapment—” Burrows struggled on.
“What?”
“The astronauts in the elevator.”
“Oh. I heard it got stuck.”
“Shut up, Velocci.”
“Conspiracy to defraud the government—”
“What do you mean by that?”
“This damn contract! It’s a fraud!” Fisk threw the contract at Cecil, its pages coming unstapled. Cecil ducked and the pages went flying, wafting to the floor one by one.
Burrows kept going. “Destruction of government property—”
“Oh, come on!” Cecil felt his confidence increase. The agents, for all their browbeating tactics, still hadn’t said anything that made him worry about the contract not holding up. “You can’t prove any of those charges,” he said. “So stop trying to scare me with them.”
“I’m going to tell you one more time to shut up! Go on, Burrows.”
“I’m finished, sir.”
Fisk glared at Burrows. “He’s finished, Velocci. Well, what do you have to say to that?”
Cecil sat back, folding his hands on his stomach. “Not guilty.”
Fisk huffed, got up, walked around the table, and stuck his face into Velocci’s. “This is
no goddamned court of law. What do you mean NOT GUILTY?”
Cecil reached out, very slowly, very dramatically, and pointed at the contract pages on the floor. “MEC has a legal contract with the government.”
“Let me get this straight. You think that crummy little paper makes you not guilty on which charges?”
“On all charges.” Cecil got up, picked up each sheet, sat down, and restacked them. He looked around the room. “Am I under arrest?”
Fisk stalked back to his chair and sat down. “There’s one charge we haven’t written down, not yet. You need to know about it, think about it very carefully. Did you know Dr. High Eagle is a Native American, Mr. Velocci?”
Cecil felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Now he was scared. “Yes, of course, but what—?”
“Your clients have detained against her will a minority citizen of these United States, Mr. Velocci. That, by definition, is a hate crime, a federal offense. Any lawyer who defends anyone accused of a hate crime becomes very unpopular, subject perhaps to being accused of committing a hate crime himself.”
It took a lot to anger Cecil but Fisk was nearly there. “Are you threatening me, Agent Fisk?” he growled.
Fisk shrugged. “Yes, Mr. Velocci, I am. You need to think this through. You’re out of your league.”
“Are my clients officially charged with anything?” Cecil asked coldly.
“Not at this time. But I want all their names.”
“I will provide you with a list of all MEC employees. Am I free to go?”
“Not at this time. You’re due on a plane to Washington in one hour.”
“For what purpose?”
Fisk grimaced, or it might have been a grin. It was hard for Cecil to tell. “You’ll find that out when you get there, Mr. Island-in-the-sun attorney. It ain’t gonna be fun, I can tell you that!”
Cecil pointed. “I’ll want a copy of that,” he said, indicating the list of charges. “I’ll need them to start the preparation of the defense of my clients should they in fact be charged with anything.”