Orbital Maneuvers

by R Davison

  “I guess it must have been set up as an experiment and not really part of the normal station equipment.” Susan volunteered. “So, whoever was using it knew what had to be done and how to do it.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up on this yet! It may be in here, someplace. I just have to figure out the right questions to ask in my search.” Paul turned to the display again and resumed his searching.

  Susan switched on the intercom to inform Alexander that he only had about forty-five minutes to do the EVA to reconnect the power to the comm system, before they would be approaching the impact zone off the coast of Florida.

  “Commander,” Alexander said reassuringly, “Since I know what I need to do, the walk will only take about twenty-five minutes to complete. It will take longer to get there than it will to reconnect the cables.”

  Susan thought about it, going over the routine in her mind. She knew it would probably be quicker than the first time, but she also knew that things often don’t go by the book.

  “No, Alexander,” she said. “I think it would be wiser to wait until after we pass over the Florida impact zone. That will give you ninety minutes to complete the task, instead of the forty-five you would have now.”

  “Commander,” Alexander argued, “If I go now, and we finish this up, then you will be able to establish a communications link with Korolev, or maybe one of the other NASA stations. If we run into trouble passing over Florida, at least they will know that we are here, and if we use the CRV then they will know to track us.” Silence filled the intercom while Susan weighed the proposal. She did not like being pressured to make a decision but knew that the longer she took to decide, the smaller the window Alexander would have to safely complete the EVA. Alexander waited patiently, but he also knew that his window was getting smaller with each minute they delayed. “Commander, what is your decision?”

  “Twenty-five minutes, Commander Orlov?” Susan asked hesitantly, knowing what his answer would be.

  “Twenty-five minutes,” came the expected reply.

  Susan bit her lip. “Go. But! If you have not completed the task by then, you are to come back in, no questions asked. Clear?”

  “Perfectly, Commander Corin.”

  “Susan! Please!” Susan demanded, but Alexander was already too busy getting into the airlock to hear her.

  Alexander, with Nicholas’ help, made his way into the airlock and shortly was back into the harsh void of space. He secured his new tether and quickly made his way to the top of the truss, then propelled himself toward the communications node. Realizing that he was moving quite fast, he cautioned himself not to get careless. It is easier to get going than it is to stop. He learned that lesson the hard way, the first time he was on MIR.

  Alexander forced himself to slow down and tried to remember the procedure he would have to go through to reconnect the communication system. He suddenly realized that he did not leave the electronics bay in an orderly fashion and wondered what condition the cables were in, being that Jerry yanked him out of there while he still had them in his hands. He hoped that they had not been damaged.

  While Alexander was making his way to the P6 truss, Susan used the time to review the checklist to reconnect the power cables and close up the electronics bay. Paul was still looking for more useful information on the radar system, but took a few minutes to review his end of the task in reconnecting full communications. Nicholas stayed by Susan’s station in case there were any language problems.

  The intercom crackled. “Commander, I am almost there.”

  “Alexander, you have the tools you need?” Susan asked, as she suddenly remembered that he would need the power hand tool.

  “Yes, I was amazed that they did not come off my suit when I took my ride. I have everything I had before,” Alexander’s voice dropped off as his eyes caught a glimpse of two snake-like objects dancing back and forth near the access panel where he was working.

  “Alexander, are you all right?” Susan asked in a very tense voice. She had become very intolerant of sudden, unplanned changes.

  “Yes, Susan, I am okay. The cables are hanging out of the electronics compartment, and…the way they were moving, they looked like two cobras dancing out of the box!…I am back in touch with reality. I think!” Ivan and Nicholas chuckled with Alexander, while Susan let out a sigh of relief.

  “Well, well, well, that does not look good,” Alexander muttered to himself, not realizing that the intercom had picked it up.

  Susan was on edge again. “I’m beginning to dislike that phrase! What doesn’t look good?”

  “The cables were pulled out from the electronics compartment, and they have been bouncing off the edge of the access panel. The sheathing is quite abraded on one of the cables.”

  Ivan asked, “Was the cable cut through to expose the internal wires?”

  Alexander was flexing the cable trying to get a better view of the damage as Ivan asked his question. “No, Ivan. It looks as if the outer sheath and shield were cut, but not all the way to the internal wires.”

  “We were lucky that we got to it as soon as we did,” Nicholas commented.

  Alexander interrupted, “Lucky, well, maybe. These cables were pulled out of the compartment much further than I could get them when I was working on them. I am afraid that there may be some damage deeper inside the electronics compartment.”

  Susan found herself chewing on her lip. “Alexander, can you see any visible damage?”

  “No, not without disassembling more of the compartment.”

  Susan looked to Ivan, “I think we should just hook it up and try it out.”

  Ivan nodded in agreement. “I can run a diagnostic once he reconnects the cables.”

  “Okay, Alexander, go ahead and reconnect the cables, and Ivan will run a diagnostic once that is done.”

  “Understood, I will begin to reconnect the cables now.” As Alexander started to move to improve his access to the inside of the electronics bay, he hesitated, and decided he had to address an anxiety that was nagging him since he arrived at the end of the P6 truss. He slowly turned around to make sure that there was nothing sneaking up behind him, half expecting to see the manipulator arm poised over him, ready to snatch him off the station again.

  Reassured to see nothing of the sort, Alexander let out a deep sigh of relief. This was picked up by the intercom, causing the four people inside the station to look at each other questioningly. Alexander turned back to the electronics bay to put the snakes back in the box.

  Paul had been half listening to the conversations going on around him, but when he found what he was looking for, he lost track of what they were saying. As he began to read about the radar system and how the astronauts onboard were to use and maintain it, he found a small section discussing calibration of the system. As he read further and began to understand more about the system, he could feel beads of perspiration forming on his forehead. He knew, even before he finished the section, that the number they got before on the altitude of the cloud layer was wrong. Very wrong!

  “Damn it!” Paul snapped

  Susan knew immediately what Paul’s outburst was about. “What’s the matter?” She moved over to his station to look at what he was reading.

  “Damn, I should have known! The altitude numbers were accurate at our previous altitude. At this higher altitude, they are wrong. By almost a factor of two!”

  “So that means that the layer we saw before is about three hundred miles?” Susan asked, as she began to weigh the consequences of this information.

  “Yes, the bulk of the layer would be about that. What bothers me more are the chunks of stuff that the radar can’t pick up that may be riding above that layer,” Paul answered, as he began to adjust the values the computer used to calculate the altitude of the target it was tracking.

  “Yes, I see what you mean.” Susan thought about it in silence for a moment and then began to verbalize her thoughts.

  “Where are the real danger zones?”
she asked. “Anything that was thrown vertically up would fall back to Earth after gravity slowed it down. Anything that had a lateral velocity would travel from the impact site and would eventually come back down by atmospheric drag. There would be some stuff that would have enough lateral velocity to reach a high enough altitude to stay in some orbit for days to weeks or months. I would guess that the stuff that you see at three hundred miles must be very fine stuff, if it is still up after fourteen hours.”

  Ivan said, “The smaller dust clouds would not be a problem for us as long as they are below the station. The pieces that are bigger than a few grams are going to be a problem for a while, possibly a long while. They will have no cross-section to speak of, to suffer the drag effects of the atmosphere, so they will tend to stay up for a long time. And then there will be the bigger pieces.”

  “Yes, the bigger pieces,” Susan chimed in. “I thought—I hoped, we would be safe at this altitude, but I guess that was wishful thinking.”

  “Well, not really,” Ivan interrupted, as he floated over to Paul’s station. “If we did nothing, we surely would have hit the dust clouds we tracked last orbit. We are much better off here, at the higher altitude, but we may still have to contend with these rogue moonlets.”

  “Well, we are here, and we can’t get any higher. We will have to deal with it,” Susan didn’t get to finish, as she was interrupted by Alexander announcing that he had reconnected the cables, and was waiting for them to do the power-on test to the communication systems. Susan had momentarily forgotten that Alexander was outside while she worried about the distribution of debris.

  “Damn, I forgot about Alexander! We have to get him back inside now! There’s no telling what is in orbit, and we’re approaching the Florida impact zone. We are fair game for anything that is out there.”

  Ivan quickly moved over to his station and called up the program that would power up the communication system. Paul went to the rack that he had worked on before, reconnected the power couplings and reseated the power chassis. “The KU-band system should be back online,” he announced to Ivan.

  “Alright! The KU-band checks out. It is still running the diagnostic on the SU-band system.”

  Susan was getting very anxious about having Alexander outside at this time. She decided that they would go with the KU-band communication system and forget about the other for now. “Time’s up Alexander, get back to the airlock now!”

  Alexander was in the process of reconnecting the cover plate, thinking that if everything worked with the communication system, he would be done. And, if he had to get back inside, it would only take a few minutes to undo the screws that held the plate. “Is there a problem I should know about? He did not like the edge in Susan’s voice, but kept working as he waited for a response.

  “Alexander, we are getting too close to the impact zone. I don’t think it is wise that you remain outside the station now. Get back to the airlock, don’t worry about closing up the electronics bay. Just get back, now!”

  From the tone of Susan’s voice, Alexander knew that he should not delay his trip back. He came from an old fashioned family, from the “old world.” There, they believed in such things as premonitions, fortune telling, spirits, and a few other things that embarrassed him to admit his family believed in.

  His gut told him that he should probably heed the warnings of a woman who dreamt of this cataclysm that Earth was now enduring. He had one screw left and he briefly looked at it, contemplating whether or not he should reinstall it on the cover. Looking at the partially secured cover plate, he decided no. He stuffed the screw into his pocket, attached the tools to his suit, and headed back across the truss to the airlock.

  “On my way, Commander” he announced.

  Shooting a glance at the planet below, he could see dark clouds on the horizon, rapidly approaching. He noted to himself that it was unusual to see dark clouds from space.

  Usually, the clouds appeared pristine white as they reflected the sunlight back into space. On Earth, the clouds looked dark because of their thickness and how much light they blocked. He did not stop to ponder this observation, but took it as further evidence to heed Susan’s warning and hurried along toward the airlock.

  Ivan announced, with relief in his voice, “SU-band is online now, too. We should have full communications in a minute.”

  Alexander smiled as he heard the good news and pulled himself along the truss, hand-over-hand, with a bit more enthusiasm. Even though he was in a zero-g environment, the exertion from pulling himself along in a controlled fashion had his heart beating faster and increased his respiration rate. His visor was starting to fog up, but he kept up the pace because he was almost halfway to the airlock and safety.

  Watching his tether dance ahead of him as he was moving along the truss, he suddenly froze and let out a yelp at the sight of the tether exploding in a flash of light, not twenty feet in front of him! Instinctively Alexander pulled himself closer to the truss, like a soldier caught in an open field trying to hide from a sniper.

  He tried to look around, and cursed his limited view through the fogged visor and the inflexibility of his space suit. After a few moments the initial shock faded. His visor began to clear as the suit compensated for the sudden increase in humidity from Alexander’s increased perspiration.

  He realized that the pebble that hit the tether did so without any advanced warning. He would never be able to react to a similar projectile flying at him, because he would never see it coming.

  Rising up slowly from the truss, he looked at the shredded ends of the tether floating aimlessly, as if they were two blind snakes trying to find each other in some mystical mating dance. His hands gripped the metal of the truss harder as he realized that his lifeline with the station was severed.

  Very carefully he resumed his hand-over-hand locomotion, as quickly as he dared. He did not want to slip and have to use his maneuvering jets to get back to the station, not knowing how much fuel they had left from his previous adventure. He also did not want to stay out there any longer than was necessary.

  Susan snapped to attention at Alexander’s startled yelp. “Alexander? What’s wrong?” Nicholas echoed the same sentiments, in Russian to his commander, and they all waited on edge for a reply. Susan called out again, but was interrupted by Alexander’s calm voice answering her initial question.

  “I am okay. My tether apparently has been hit by something and has been severed.”

  “Where are you? Do you need assistance?” Susan asked, fearing the worst. She had visions of Alexander being left behind, floating in space as the station moved on in its orbit. She shuddered at the thought of being stranded in space.

  “I am almost to the airlock. I should be able to make it to the hatch without any problems. Do not worry.” Alexander made his way to the frayed end of the tether that was attached to the station. Once he had it securely in hand, he carefully pulled himself along to the airlock.

  “I will meet you at the airlock, Commander,” Nicholas called out, “please be careful. I do not want to have to come and get you!”

  “Believe me, comrade, I do not want for you to have to come and get me!” Alexander replied with the slightest bit of strain showing in his voice as he maneuvered around the side of the airlock on his way to the hatch. It would feel good to get out of the confines of the suit, and not feel so isolated from his friends.

  Paul was beginning to pick up a return signal from the debris floating over Florida. He was getting much of the same data as before, a very strong return with the layer residing between two to three hundred miles above the surface of the planet. He switched the camera’s view from the visual spectrum to the infrared to see what it might tell him and was rewarded with an eerie image of a bright red, oval spot over the eastern coast of Florida gradually changing to darker colors of red in the center. The colors eventually changed from the reds to blues a good distance north or south of the impact zone where the temperatures were cooler.

/>   “Susan, Ivan, take a look at this,” Paul called out, a bit shaken at the sight before him.

  “Oh, Christ!” Ivan exclaimed, as he immediately understood the image.

  Susan moved over and rested her hand on Paul’s shoulder. He could feel it tighten as she stared at the image.

  “What does it look like in the visual spectrum?” she asked.

  Paul typed a command and the screen turned back to a normal color image, with mostly blackish swirling clouds and some green land and blue ocean far off in the distance.

  “Can you switch it back?” Susan asked in a low voice. She studied the false color image and pointed out the area further east of Florida, which showed very little red or orange. “That’s the ocean impact, still hot, but not as hot as the land impact.”

  “Yes, and look to the west,” Paul said. “You can barely make out the increasing temperatures closer toward Texas.” The colors showed a cooling trend moving west from Florida, but the trend began reversing as you approached the Texas impact zone.

  “Paul, can you tell what the temperatures are?” Ivan asked, as he moved off to one side of the compartment. He had seen enough for now and would rather focus on something less depressing.

  “I don’t know what the calibration was for this. I guess you should remember that this was calibrated to monitor the heat signatures of the cloud layers and ground surface, so the high temperatures in these areas are probably saturating the sensors. I would guess that these areas are easily five hundred to a thousand degrees Celsius in the strike zones.”

  “You are probably close,” Ivan replied in a very subdued tone. “I,” Ivan did not finish his statement as the intercom burst forth with static and a new voice, “Space station Alpha…space station Alpha…do you copy?”

  XIX

  “Space station Alpha…space station Alpha…do you copy?” the voice echoed in the silent module as everyone floated frozen in place. “This is Lieutenant Carol Barnes, at the NORAD Space Center, do you copy?” To Susan, the voice sounded tired, or bored, it was hard to tell, but she felt a small sense of relief when she heard it. She moved over to the communications console, and paused for a moment to settle her jangled nerves before she switched on the microphone.