Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  In fact, the hijacked module had been silent for the last few minutes. The radio signals which had been sent on several different frequencies to Olympus Command from the module had ceased, and no one on Olympus Station seemed to know what was going on any more than Freedom Command. Station Commander Paul Edgar had received a classified, coded message from the National Security Agency shortly after the crisis had begun; he had destroyed the message, printed on a sheet of flimsy, immediately after reading it, and had told his crew that they were to exercise extreme caution in dealing with the three strangers who had taken over the NSA module.

  As for Dobbs, who had escaped to give Freedom’s command personnel their first warning of the crisis, he found himself in the irritating position of being ignored and shunted aside. Practically pushed into a corner of the command module, he could only watch as Edgar and the others tried to deal with the situation. Edgar had placed several crewmen by the sealed hatch leading to the access tunnel to the NSA module, but he was hesitant to have them unseal the hatch and storm the module.

  “There’s reason to believe that those men are dangerous,” Edgar had explained to Dobbs minutes ago.

  “Good God, man, I could have told you that,” Dobbs had retorted. “At least one of them is a maniac. We’ve got to get them out of there!”

  Edgar had nodded his head slightly. “We’ll get them out of there, sir,” he had said in a voice which at once dutifully acknowledged Dobbs’ position as an important visitor representing both Skycorp and the U.S. Government, and diplomatically sought to remind Dobbs just who was in charge here. “But I won’t have either this station or its crew endangered. I want to first attempt to contact these men and negotiate with them. Get them to come out of there on their own accord. They don’t have much choice, so it’s in our favor.”

  It had been a couple of minutes since then, and the officer who had repeatedly tried to make contact with the intruders had still failed to reach them. Dobbs sweated and clung to a handhold, trying to contain his anxiety. The thought of his personal responsibility for the logistics module, with its crucial and costly payload, had never escaped his mind.

  “Skipper, I’ve got Olympus again,” the communications officer said. “They say they’ve had some problems of their own, probably related, and that the security officer aboard has made some arrests. They’re also searching for three missing crewmen—John Hamilton, Bruce Neiman, and Claude Hooker.”

  Edgar glanced at Dobbs, and Dobbs nodded his head quickly. “That’s our boys,” Edgar replied. “Tell them we’ve got tentative identification and keep in touch.”

  “Paul, Willy Ley is on final approach for docking,” the traffic engineer called over his shoulder. “Should I tell them to hold and make another orbit before they rendezvous?”

  The station commander thought for a moment. “No, no, they might need that fuel,” he said. “Rendezvous and dock as planned, Charlie, but inform them we’ve got… Oh, hell, just tell ’em we’ve got an emergency and skip the details. Lisa and Steve will understand. I hope, anyway.”

  He tapped the man at the intercom station on the shoulder. “What’s the scoop, Renaldo?”

  “Nothing, Skipper. If they’re listening, they won’t tell us so.”

  “Damnation,” Edgar muttered, leaning his hands on the back of Renaldo’s seat. He glanced once more at Dobbs, then turned back to the communications officer. “Okay, tell Patrick to wait a minute, then open that hatch and wait for my word.”

  Renaldo punched a button on his console and said into his headset mike, “Code 21, this is Red Rider. Count from sixty and open it, but await go-code, repeat…”

  Suddenly a loud, harsh buzz sounded from a station behind him and Edgar. As they both looked sharply around, the environmental engineer stared at her board and snapped, “Airlock Three depressurized and opening, sir! We read depressurization in AT-1 registering sudden pressure drop.” At that moment a warning Klaxon went off in the compartment.

  “Explosive decompression?” Edgar shouted over the alarms.

  “Negative!” she shouted back. “The airlock’s outer hatch has been opened, and the controls have been set for trickle decompression of the access tunnel.” As she shouted, her eyes flicked across the readouts and her hands flew across the panel’s switches. “All compartments sealed!” she shouted. “Pressure dropping to 4 psi in AT-1, all other compartments registering minimal drop!”

  “What?” Edgar shouted. He then yelled to no one in particular, “Shut the alarms off! How is…”

  “Skipper, it’s Patrick and his men!” Renaldo snapped. “They can’t get their hatch open!”

  Hamilton wanted to squeeze his eyes tightly shut and at the same time keep them wide open. Earth lay below his feet like a vast, curving plain. Although his mind told him quite reasonably that he couldn’t fall those 300 miles to the cloud-flecked West African veldt below, his hands were locked in a death grip on the magnetic plates which held him to the outer surface of the space station.

  Jack. Virgin Bruce’s voice crackled through his helmet’s earphones. He was about ten feet ahead of Hamilton, making his own way hand-over-hand across a module, toward the aluminum truss which ran the length of Freedom Station.

  “Right behind you, Bruce,” Hamilton said, hearing himself gasping hollowly in the confines of his helmet.

  Don’t look at the Earth, Jack. Just concentrate on your hands and keep your eyes straight ahead.

  “Right.” Hamilton jerked his gaze away from the planet, looked up at his gloved hands and the magnetic grippers clasped in each hand. The grippers had come from a locker Virgin Bruce had found near the airlock through which they had exited; they were normally used by inspection and repair crews who were working EVA and didn’t want to fool with either tethers or MMU backpacks. He released the thumb of his right hand from the button on the gripper’s handle, moved the gripper forward a few feet, and pushed the button again; the gripper’s electromagnetic charge held to the metal skin of the module. Then he released the button on the left-hand gripper, swung it in front of the right hand, and pushed the button again.

  Hurry it up. Virgin Bruce said. I can see the shuttle. It’s on final approach now. No, don’t look for it! Just keep your mind on getting to the truss. We’ve got to get to that thing before they figure out what we’re up to.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Hamilton said. Their progress with the grippers was slow, only a few feet at a time, and at least a hundred feet separated them from the docking bay where Willy Ley would connect with Freedom. In the time limit to which they were confined, there was no way that they could make it.

  We’ll get there, Virgin Bruce replied. Once we get to the truss we can get rid of these things and the climb will be much quicker. But you’ve got to…

  Suddenly they both felt a small but violent jarring of the station’s superstructure, as if something had just smacked into Freedom. At first Hamilton thought it was Willy Ley making an exceptionally hard dock. Then he looked down at Earth again.

  A long, fat cylinder was moving away from the station, trailing bits of metal and fiberglass debris which glistened with reflected sunlight. It only took him a moment to recognize the cylinder as being one of the space station’s modules, and he knew which module it was.

  “Adios, Popeye,” he said.

  The firing of the explosive bolts had been a little more violent than Hooker had anticipated. Seconds after he had thrown the detonating switch and hit the timer, he had grabbed onto handholds with both hands and had silently counted back from ten. The engineers who had designed the modules—which were essentially the same as Olympus modules, although with some important variations—had apparently left nothing to chance when they had added the emergency option for module separation. The explosions kicked the Ear module completely free of Freedom Station, and they also nearly kicked Hooker’s teeth out of his head.

  At the instant the module sheared away from the station, the lights went out inside the modul
e as the power connection was severed. Hooker had already donned his helmet and gloves and had repressurized his suit. He now flicked on his helmet lamps and went immediately to work on the next, crucial phase of his desperate ploy.

  Uncoiling a nylon cord from his utility belt, he quickly looped one end around a ceiling handhold, knotted it, then did the same with the other end through the tether ring on the front of his suit. After testing both knots, he then pushed himself toward the module’s sealed hatch. Grabbing the locking arm with both hands, he pushed it down, unlocking the hatch, then did a backward half gainer and kicked the hatch open with both feet.

  Instant decompression flung all the loose objects in the module through the hatch. The silent explosion would have thrown Hooker out into space as well had it not been for the rope. His chest hit a console and he grabbed in the darkness for something to hold onto against the torrent. His fingers fell across and instinctively snagged a foot restraint. Hooker held on tight, and turned his head around inside his helmet to watch as a communications headset—probably the one which Hamilton had thrown at him in anger—whipped through the hatch like a mass of ganglia.

  Then, as quickly as it had begun, the rush of air ceased. Vacuum had replaced the module’s atmosphere. Hooker released the foot restraint and pushed himself toward the open hatch to look outside.

  The module was now in a slow tumble, end over end, and he saw Freedom Station swing up and away, far away now, its tiny lights and Erector-set construction making it look like an elaborate kid’s toy. Earth then swam into view, much closer than it had been before.

  Popeye smiled. So far, so good. The sudden decompression had given the Ear module that extra boost it needed to greatly reduce the likelihood of its being recaptured by a tug from the station. Now it was plummeting down Earth’s gravity well, following a course of orbital decay which would bring it to a fiery end in the upper atmosphere. Hooker figured that the trip would take about ten or fifteen minutes.

  “And now it’s your turn, Sweet Pea,” he murmured to himself. Hooker had no intention of escorting the nerve center of Big Ear to its death by friction. Although, he knew, his only alternative for escape was less suicidal only by a matter of degrees.

  Turning his back to the hatch and pushing himself further into the module, he searched with his hands and his helmet lamps until he found the candy-striped locker he had spotted before. It was marked with a red arrow reading ESCAPE. He twisted the recessed locking wheel and lowered the compartment’s door. Inside was a trunk-sized package wrapped in clear, heavy-duty plastic. Hooker unsnapped the securing belts, unzipped the plastic bag, and reached inside as his mind raced across details he recalled from a technical briefing he had received at Skycorp’s training center at Cape Canaveral.

  During the formative years of manned space exploration—even before the disasters and near-disasters which had plagued the American and Soviet space programs during the first decades of the push—NASA had been developing ways of rescuing astronauts stranded in space. One was the rescue ball, which became standard equipment aboard American spacecraft in the 80s. Another method was one which was kicked around for decades by designers before finally becoming accepted around the year 2000. It was developed by NASA but considered by them too unsafe to use. Then, private industry further refined it and began putting it aboard manned spacecraft used in LEO operations. At first NASA’s regulators hemmed and hawed at the idea, until it was pointed out that for an astronaut, in a life or death situation, a slim chance of survival was better than no chance at all.

  The words of the Skycorp instructor who had taught Hooker’s class in the use of the rescue device came back to haunt him as he shrugged out of his life-support pack. “Frankly, fellas, if I had a choice between using this thing and freezing to death or suffocating in my spacesuit, I’d probably opt for the latter,” she had said candidly after her demonstration. “Your chances of getting out alive using this thing are about as much as surviving a ride down Niagara Falls in a barrel. Half of the dummies they used in tests either burned up or crash-landed at about 1,000 miles per hour. As far as I know, no one living has ever used it. It scares the hell out of even the Navy test pilots. If you’re stranded in LEO, do yourself a favor. Zip yourself into a rescue ball and wait it out. This is probably the dumbest, most dangerous thing built for spaceflight.”

  Popeye tried not to think about it. He clamped off the air intake/outtake valves, removed the hoses from his suit, and quickly strapped to his stomach the little oxygen cylinder which contained about thirty minutes worth of air. It was more than enough to see him through, regardless of the outcome. When he had clamped on its hoses, he took a deep breath, then reached into the bag and pulled out the miniature rocket engine.

  Rocky had apparently given her the message, because she appeared at the dock shortly before sundown. He was scrubbing the aft deck, down on his hands and knees with a stiff brush and a pail of soapy water, when he felt her presence. He didn’t hear her coming, but he knew she was there. Love is like that; you know when your mate is nearby. As he sat back on his haunches and looked up at Laura, who stood on the pier framed against the setting sun, he realized that the same could be said to be true about someone you’ve come to hate….

  The control mechanism with its built-in gyroscope fitted directly below his helmet, just above the rocket where it mounted on his chest. Working in haste now, he pulled the bag off the rest of the package and cast it aside. In the shimmer of his helmet lantern it floated at the edge of his vision like a formless, translucent ghost. Hefting the bundle, he slid his arms through the shoulder straps and tightened them, then fastened the belt and crotch straps. It fitted to his back like an oversized expedition backpack, with almost the same mass as an MMU.

  Hooker looked around once at the darkened compartment, then focused his mind quickly again on what he had to do: get out of there. Get out because the ship is sinking, the ship is sinking…

  “Hi,” she said. Her voice would have been bright if it was not somehow numbed, the greeting casual if the tone not guarded. “What’s happening, sailor?”

  She was so beautiful; blue halter top, brown skin, brown hair, faded jeans… he could make out all that even with the bright orange sun behind her shining in his eyes, making him squint. She was so beautiful. I love you, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t. He was unable to see her face. “Nothing,” he said. “C’mon aboard.”

  Popeye pushed himself to the hatch and held on to its circular rim with both hands, lowering his back and pushing his shoulders forward, remembering Helen Myricki’s instructions from way back when. From here on out, timing had to be right. He waited until the module’s pitching motion brought the huge, shining rim of Earth into view. Then he pushed himself out into space.

  Earth was much closer now. The module was quickly descending now, its drag increasing as it began contact with the uppermost reaches of the ionosphere. He kicked away from it gently, keeping his back turned against the planet, and watched as the fat cylinder—for the first time, he saw that it was painted with an American flag and U.S. Air Force wings—slowly fell away behind him, seemingly pushed away by his legs, although it was him, not the module, which had been pushed.

  His breath was coming hard now, and his hands felt sloppy with sweat inside his gauntlets. He had an urge to pee, but he had disconnected the recirculation tubes to his crotch when he had taken off his life-support pack, so he couldn’t whizz into the cup because the urine might bottle up in his suit, potentially causing a short in his auxiliary power unit or, probably worse, seeping up through the neck rung into his helmet. He forgot the urge and stared hard at the register on his control unit, at the glowing digits and the tiny artificial horizon. This was the critical part, the gauging of the reentry path. Then he remembered the pack’s firing controls; how could have he missed that? Hooker reached with both hands, down to the back of his hips. His hands found the pack’s two arms, and he grasped them and pulled them level with his waist, locking
them in place.

  His right thumb slid open a tiny compartment on the inside of the left armrest, and he gently pulled a thin cable from the armrest and fitted it into a socket on his chest control. A light on the readout below his face turned yellow. His right hand went to the chest control and flicked a tiny toggle switch. The light switched from yellow to green: the system was armed. Hooker’s eyes went back to the artificial horizon, watching as the dark cross’s X and Y axes slowly drifted toward a parallel with the Earth’s curve. Just a second closer, just a few more fractions of an inch…

  Impulsively, he glanced back up at the black ceiling of space. His eyes ran back and forth, searching the darkness. He could make out a tiny fusion of bright red and white stars, irregularly spaced, near the edge of his visual horizon, and he guessed it was Freedom. But that wasn’t what he was searching for. It was crazy to become nostalgic at this point for a place he had always detested, but in spite of that he searched for a tiny ring of light. Where was Skycan?

  With Virgin Bruce leading the way, Hamilton managed to crawl along a structural brace, down along the side of the airlock module to where the Willy Ley was docked. They were careful to keep the module between them and the adjacent command module, whose rectangular portholes overlooked the shuttle. The long, jointed Canadarm was gently lowering a payload canister marked with the Johnson & Johnson logo into the shuttle’s open cargo bay as Bruce and Jack pushed themselves off the station module and gently glided into the cargo bay.

  An astronaut in a spacesuit bearing the Skycorp patch and a black name-patch reading S.F. COFFEY was in the bay, his boots hooked into foot restraints on the deck. He was in the process of attaching the leading end of the station’s orbital tether into a bolt inside the bay, and his mirrored faceplate swung around to face the two men as they alighted nearby. After quickly making sure that the tether cable was firmly anchored to the shuttle, he slipped his boots out of the restraints and pushed himself toward Jack, who was holding onto the bay’s side.