Death Orbit

by Maloney, Mack;

  Geraci located the Hubble’s TV input plug right where Ben had said it would be. After a minor struggle trying to get coaxial cable to screw in, the small TV was finally hooked into the enormous trash barrel of a satellite.

  The most amazing thing of all, at least to Hunter’s mind, was that the Hubble still had some power left in it. It took several punches of the diagnostic panel, but incredibly, a reserve battery or something kicked in, and Hunter was soon staring at an image of the M404 Galaxy, which the Hubble’s lens had just started picking up randomly.

  JT floated over to him, took a peek at the TV screen, and then tapped Hunter twice on the helmet.

  “What now, pardner?” he called over the radio.

  It was a good question, one to which Hunter really had no reply.

  “You and the G-man go back inside,” he told JT unexpectedly. “I think I’ve got to do this alone.”

  JT just stared back at him, helmet-to-helmet. They’d been friends for a very long time.

  “I’m sure whatever is bothering you will get better, Hawk,” he said, with uncharacteristic volume control. “And whenever you’re ready, we’ll go back and snatch that A-hole Viktor again. Don’t worry. He still can’t go anywhere. And it’ll be more fun the second time around. I guarantee it.”

  With that, JT gave Geraci the high sign and they both floated back to the Zon, waiting about 100 feet away.

  Now Hunter was alone in outer space.

  He could not count the number of times he’d dreamed of this moment when he was a kid. He would spend endless hours in his bed, looking out his window to the stars above and knowing somehow, in some way, he’d walk among them someday. Now here he was, just another heavenly body, doing exactly what his childhood dreams had said he’d do.

  What he hadn’t counted on back then—what he couldn’t have conceived of—was that a weight the size of the universe would be resting on his heart when he finally did take that walk among the stars. Here, in what should have been his most supremely content moment, he was actually the saddest and most miserable he’d ever been in his life.

  Dominique was dead—he knew that now. Somehow she had passed on. And she had loved him to the end, had stayed true even while he’d been waffling, dallying with an infatuation named Chloe. This was the hand that gripped the vise that was now tightening around his heart. How would he ever forget that? How would he ever reconcile the fact that Dominique died still in love with him, while he wasn’t so sure about being in love with her?

  Suddenly, he missed his father and mother very much. He’d been alone, without close family, since his teens. JT and Ben were his best friends; the UAAF inner circle constituted his extended family. But he’d been alone—really alone—for many years. Until Dominique.

  Now she was gone, too.

  Hunter stared out at the blanket of stars swirling above his head. A billion galaxies, each one filled with an average of a billion stars. That was a lot of hydrogen burning up there. He turned and sadly looked back at the earth. Blue was the main color with some green and brown and white of clouds here and there. They were just passing over Central America; the rim of West Africa was almost in view. The Atlantic looked particularly clear and blue, but there was a gathering of clouds up around the northeast part of the eastern seaboard. The angle wasn’t quite right and Hunter couldn’t see very much, but the clouds seemed to be turning in a very angry fashion.

  For some reason, this brought him back to the matter at hand.

  Some of Dominique’s last words to him said that he should point the Hubble toward a part of the sky that his instincts led him to. Oddly enough, now that the satellite wasn’t tumbling, shifting it this way and that wasn’t so much of a big deal.

  But where to point it exactly? And what would he see when he did?

  He closed his eyes and let his psyche take over. Millions of thought fragments went through his head. He found himself seeing bits and pieces of the images leading up to the Zon launch, and then back to the battle of Lolita Island, and then back further to when he first met Chloe, to when he saw the Zon first go up with Viktor inside, to the battle of Khe Sanh, the war in the Pacific against the Cult, the invasion of the Fourth Reich, all the way back through his many battles with the Twisted Cross, the Family, the Mid-Aks, the Russians.

  And then he went even further back, to the pre-Big War days when he was trained to pilot the NASA shuttle, to his flying with the Thunderbirds, to his earning his pilot’s wings after graduating from MIT, the youngest person ever to do so.

  Suddenly he was back at his home in Boston. He was a kid again and he was lying in his bed, looking up at the stars, picking out his favorite formations, and deciding that he liked the Big Dipper the best.

  That’s when he felt another tap on his shoulder. He spun around, fully expecting to see Dominique, hovering in space with him—but she was not there. Instead, he looked straight ahead, and sure enough, taking up almost his entire field of vision, were the stars that made up the Big Dipper.

  That’s how he knew which way he should point the Hubble.

  It took Hunter more than an hour to do it.

  Jostling the big ash can was beginning to sap his strength, and as his colleagues watched anxiously from the Zon, they knew his air supply would be running low soon, too.

  He stayed with it, finally lining up what he was seeing on his TV screen with the center of the field which made up the lower part of the Big Dipper.

  That’s when he saw it.

  It was so big and moving so fast, Hunter was certain at first that there was something wrong with the mickey-mouse viewing system they’d set up. It looked like a tremendously huge star literally falling out of the heavens. He figured out a way to make the Hubble’s lens zoom in closer and tighter, and that’s when he saw this thing in all its frightening girth and color.

  It looked like a gigantic snowball—or more accurately, an iceball. He could see the sparkling effect of the sun’s rays glistening off its sides, just like the refracted light of a melting icicle. Yet the thing was almost entirely engulfed in flames. It was carrying a tail that looked like it extended for thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of miles.

  It was a comet, a huge, burning chunk of space dust and ice that was being sucked in by the sun’s gravity at such a speed even the long-range viewfinder of the Hubble couldn’t keep up with it. With shaking hands and a supercomputer-like brain that was nevertheless getting a little weary of all these revelations, Hunter used the perceived distance of the stars in the background as a measuring device and did a quick calculation on the comet’s size. He was astounded to find that it was nearly 300 miles across, or roughly one-fifth the size of earth’s moon. He did an even quicker estimation on the comet’s speed and found it was traveling at more than 200 miles a second. This meant it could cover 12,000 miles in a minute, 720,000 miles an hour, or more than 17 million miles in just one day.

  Hunter began a slow, but jittery calculation on the comet’s path. It took all his brainpower to figure the angles, the rotations, the increasing effect of gravity as opposed to the decreasing size of the comet as it neared the sun’s warmth. He reached one conclusion after five minutes of crude calculus; he added this to a second conclusion reached a few minutes later. More triangulations, more bustling around with sines and cosines and tangents. He was thinking so hard now that he didn’t even hear the warning buzzer for his oxygen supply system go off.

  Even as the front of his mask began fogging up again due to inadequate air circulation, he kept on calculating, reaching sums, adding them to quotients and multiplying them by subquotients. It took nearly 25 minutes, floating in space, doing in all this in his head, and way past what would be considered a safe point for remaining out on an EVA with such a quickly diminishing oxygen supply.

  But finally, Hunter reached an indisputable conclusion. There was no need to double-check it. The voices of the dead wouldn’t have been whispering to him if this was going to be some kind of fantastic ne
ar-miss.

  No, the numbers didn’t lie.

  The enormous burning comet was heading right for the earth.

  Twenty-eight

  Kennedy Space Center, UA Florida

  GENERAL DAVE JONES WAS asleep at his desk when the radiophone next to his ear started beeping.

  He was hardly being derelict in his duties; he hadn’t slept in 72 hours. He hadn’t eaten in that time, either, or washed much more than he could by standing at his sink. He hadn’t even shaved.

  He would still be in the same clothes, too, if a bundle of fresh laundry hadn’t shown up miraculously at his office door every morning. He had the feeling that some kind soul in the chow hall was washing it in the sink and pressing it with a rolling pin. The uniforms came cleaned and pressed, but they smelled mightily of flour and Ajax soap.

  Jones was working too long and too hard, and he had fallen asleep at his desk. It was actually fairly comfortable—his head was resting on his codebook where he had brushed away the dust and residue from the day’s shelling. The VAB might be the largest one-room freestanding structure in the world, but it was still made of concrete, and that stuff got pretty powdery after so many hours of vibration.

  The Cult’s fearsome barrage had been going on for nearly two full days. The battleships were still cruising about 24 miles offshore and their shells were still landing everywhere around the KSC, except in the heart of the base. Sticking to the game plan, the Cult gunners were dropping their enormous 16-inch warheads on the battered runway, on parts of the deserted beach, and in the swamps to the north and west of them—all with frightening accuracy. But they still weren’t hitting anything. Or at least, nothing important.

  But a nonstop barrage of one-ton shells coming in at a rate of nine a minute will shake things up a bit, and before Jones had fallen asleep, he’d been reading a report from the NJ104 engineers on the extent of damage to the KSC buildings resulting from the vibration of these horrific explosions. Some structures on the outlying areas were about ready to come toppling down if the shelling continued. The only working launch platform—the famous Pad 39-A—was experiencing some “structural mistreatment,” as were the VAB and thirteen other key buildings. The Cult and their Nazi cohorts might be set on capturing the KSC relatively intact, but with each passing hour, whether they realized it or not, they were slowly turning the space center into a bunch of wobbly, undermined buildings and launch platforms.

  At this rate, the report had concluded, by the end of the week, a medium-sized firecracker might bring down a crucial structure. Jones knew that short of destroying it all themselves, this continuous, yet harmless bombing might actually be the best scenario for the UAAF, because either way, the KSC would not be operational if and when their combined enemies managed to conquer it. The UAAF command staff had vowed that.

  It was no surprise, then, that Jones was dreaming about standing in a field with a bag of cement powder tied to his back and a heavy rain pouring down. The more it rained, the heavier the cement bag got. Eventually, it would get so wet and heavy it would harden and crush him to death. Like getting hit with a rock, except in slow motion—this was how Jones’s dream state was predicting his eventual demise.

  So the gentle buzzing of the radiophone sounded like a klaxon echoing across this wet, powdery field. Jones opened his eyes after the fourth series of beeps. He was up and stretching by the fifth series and answering it by the sixth.

  “General?” he heard the familiar yet faraway voice begin. “It’s Major Hunter. Did I disturb you, sir?” Jones thought he was still asleep.

  “Hawk?” he asked. “Really…?” Jones hadn’t spoken one word to Hunter since the Zon had lifted off about 100 years ago.

  “Really, sir. Please excuse me for…”

  “Jeezus, Hawk, where the hell are you? It sounds like you’re at a pay phone…”

  “You’re not that far off, sir,” was the reply. “And I’ll have to make this quick, because…”

  “Christ, man,” Jones interrupted. “Are you still up in orbit?”

  “Yes, sir. Definitely, sir. I realize I’m using a unconventional means of communication. But the circumstances really dictated it. And I’m afraid I must be brief.”

  “You’re calling me on my desk phone, for Chrissakes.” Jones just couldn’t get over it. “How is that possible?”

  “Well, I’m forced to use some rather primitive communications here, sir. I’ll be happy to explain it all to you later. If… if I can, that is. I think the best thing we can do now is have me explain why I’m calling you like this and let me relay a very important piece of information to you. Is that okay, sir?” Jones sat back down at his desk, cleared it of debris, and retrieved a pencil and notepad. He knew this was serious and he wanted to get it all down.

  “Go,” he told Hunter.

  There was a long pause.

  “General, I have some very grave news to report,” Hunter began—and, for the first time ever, Jones thought he heard a tremor in his voice. “We were able to recover and rejuvenate the Hubble space telescope earlier today. We got it working with some unorthodox wiring, and…”

  “Did you say the Hubble?” Jones had to ask. “That big one-eyed mirror?”

  “Yes, sir,” was Hunter’s reply. “That’s the one. We were able to turn it toward a certain section of the sky, to a coordinate that was, well, provided to me. And… and, well, sir, we detected a large object—a comet—that is heading straight for the earth, sir. It is more than 300 miles across. We estimate it weighs at least a billion and a half tons. If it hits, well… I don’t think I have to tell you what will happen…”

  Jones had dropped his pencil. His jaw was hanging open, but also curling up slightly. This had to be a joke. Hunter, calling him on the office telephone to tell him the world was about to end?

  “I know it sounds crazy, sir,” Hunter went on. “I know it sounds like a bad movie, or some tent preacher’s prediction or something—but it is true, sir. I’ve seen this thing myself—and you’ll be able to see it soon, too. It is enormous. I’ve done the calculations. It will intercept Earth’s orbit in exactly a hundred twenty hours—five days from now.

  “Now, I would say that at least one-third will burn up on the way in, but that will still leave an object weighing a billion tons on impact. If it hits land, the debris and dust will be equal to a million hydrogen bombs. If it hits the ocean, the hot gases alone will vaporize more water than is presently in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans combined.

  “The poles will melt. The tides will run up to fifty feet in places like Kansas City and Omaha. It will be catastrophic. Disastrous to the nth degree.

  “It will be the end of the world. At least, as we know it…”

  Jones was still listening. Still sitting rigid, with his jaw open. He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t ask a question or even form any kind of opinion. He knew this was Hawk Hunter speaking and knew what he was saying was the truth, and therefore he knew that the end of the world, Doomsday, was at hand.

  For a brief moment, it suddenly dawned on him that all of the crazy stuff that had been happening all around the world suddenly made a strange kind of sense to him.

  Whom the Gods choose to destroy, they first make crazy. Was that how that old saying went?

  Well, damn now if it wasn’t true. The earth was going to be destroyed—and it had gone crazy first.

  “Is there…”Jones finally managed to gulp, “…is there any chance at all… that it might miss? Or that the sun’s gravity might…”

  Now it was Hunter’s turn to interrupt.

  “The sun’s gravity is making this thing come at us even faster,” he told Jones soberly. “We figured it’s been going at a rate of about two hundred miles a second for a long time. No one saw it because it was just too far out. But now that it’s getting close, we jigged out its velocity at three hundred miles a second. When it hits us, it will be up to four hundred miles… a second. There’s just no way the numbers can be wrong.”
r />   Jones was now thinking about his family. His wife, out in California. His two grown kids, living up in Boston with their families. His six grandchildren. How would they go? Quickly? Or painfully?

  “So, it is… the end, then?” Jones stammered.

  There was a very long silence at the other end of the phone. Jones had gone numb by now; he wasn’t even sure if his ears were even working. Or his voice.

  “It is the end… right, Hawk?”

  Another short silence.

  “Maybe…” he finally heard Hunter say.

  “Maybe?” Jones breathed.

  “I mean that we have a one-in-a-billion shot at doing something about this,” he heard Hunter reply. His voice was suddenly as chilling as the news he’d just delivered.

  “Well then, spill it, man!” Jones ordered him. “If there’s a chance for us to do something, then hell, we’re better off going down fighting than ending with a whimper!”

  “My feelings exactly, General,” Hunter replied.

  There was another short silence, followed by a brief burst of static.

  “So, sir,” Hunter came back on. “This is what we have to do…”

  Fifteen minutes later, Hunter was hanging up the very ornate, highly stylized telephone.

  Like everything else in the huge, circular room around him, the phone looked like it had been manufactured some time back in the thirties, by hands who’d spent most of their idle time raised in a one-arm salute.

  It looked so old, he was amazed it worked at all.

  “Well? Did he buy the idea?”

  Hunter looked up at the man standing right over his shoulder. He was tall, thin, ugly, and had bad breath and bad skin, but his black uniform was neatly cleaned and pressed, as were his gloves, his socks, and his cap.

  “Fuck you,” Hunter told him, floating up from the Bavarian antique desk and depositing himself on the long velvet salon couch. “I’m not talking to you—or any of the other flunkies. If I talk, I’m talking to the Man himself.”