Chapter 12
The countdown ends in silence.
The only roaring is in Kip’s head, along with the soft hissing of the air cycle fans that are no match for the pounding blood in his temples. Kip’s eyes dart around the checklist and back to the screen as he sits in disbelief, the enormity of the silence settling over him like a heavy shroud. He’s been prepared for retrofire for over an hour and never considered that the engine might have other ideas.
He’s heard the engine fire before. He knows what it sounds like, feels like. When
Kip punches the manual firing button again, just to make sure he hasn’t been too timid. It clicks.
Nothing changes.
Only seconds have elapsed since the exact programmed firing point. There’s still time to fire, he thinks.
The checklist items begin to blur, but he forces his eyes to take them in item by item, his finger still stabbing at the ignition button. He checks the screen, the fault annunciator display, the switch panel to each side, expecting an “Aha” moment of recognition, the easy answer. So he’s a bit late. So he comes down in Las Vegas instead of Mojave. What the hell. Just get the damn thing to fire!
But still the engine remains silent, and even though it’s only the end of Orbit 3, Kip feels himself losing control. He balls his fist and crashes it into the central liquid crystal screen, changing nothing. He begins flipping switches at random, snarling at the display and flailing, each wild action propelling him left or right in the zero gravity, restrained only by the seat belt.
With one final burst of frustration he hurls the checklist behind him, sickeningly aware of what it’s hit as it thuds into the dead astronaut’s body, bouncing back to slap the windscreen, and ends up hitting him in the face.
But he’s hurtling away from the retrofire point at the speed of twenty-five thousand five hundred feet per second, and the engine is still quiet as a tomb.
His anger subsides and in its place flows a cold and heavy fear, worse than anything he’s experienced. Terror would barely describe it. No brakes, no parachute, no skyhook, no lifeline. No rescue of any sort if the engine won’t fire.
Until a few minutes ago, his major concern was to find a way to pilot an unpowered gliding spacecraft with stubby wings to a safe landing somewhere flat and hard. Now even a crash landing sounds okay, as long as it involves getting out of orbit.
Kip looks over his left shoulder, as if a living relief pilot might be sitting quietly back there. He feels the bile rising in his stomach, his head spinning. The view of the Earth turning below suddenly seems an exquisite form of torture—home being dangled in front of him, but out of reach.
He yanks the barf bag from his ankle pocket just in time, and when the release is complete, he cleans his face and disposes of the thing in a sidemounted trash receptacle, glad for something rote to do, his mind still reeling with the thought that he’s missed something. He opens the relief port then—a small funnel-shaped urinal dumping to the vacuum of space—and drains his bladder, before retightening the straps connecting him to the command chair.
He remembers the spacecraft simulator back in Mojave. The door in and out is on the rear cabin wall of the simulator and he remembers how comforting it was to know that at any time they could just turn the doorknob and walk out of the box into the hangar to safety. Just like that. Just open a door and leave the nightmare.
The urge to turn around and look at the rear cabin wall obsesses him. He struggles against the seat belt to turn around far enough, gripping the back of the command chair, his focus snapping to the unbroken surface of the back wall.
There is, of course, no door.
That fact triggers a buzzing disbelief and panic which crashes over him like an emotional tsunami. He feels tears on his face as the images before him begin to compress into a tunnel, and then to a single point of light, just before everything goes dark.
Richard DiFazio takes the news from Arleigh quietly. Most of the controllers have left their stations since the realization dawned that there would be no more information on the video monitors. They stand in small groups now, scattered around the room, grim and tense as they wait for something to be relayed from cameras and sensors they don’t have, the frustration compounded by their having no sources of their own.
The CEO of American Space Adventures quietly returns to the conference room and lifts a receiver, punching in the number he’d considered calling earlier, an international number he guards carefully in his PDA. The male voice answers in Russian and switches adroitly to English with a cheery greeting which changes to a serious tone at the news of
“And, of course, it will be a balmy day in the Bering Strait before our good friend Geoffrey is willing to help, no?”
“You’ve got that right. But you’ve got a resupply mission coming up in two weeks, correct?”
“What you’re thinking is not possible without money, Richard, and maybe not even then.”
“But you’ll try?”
There is a long pause and a weary sigh.
“Can your people last for eight days?”
“No.”
“Then you’re asking the impossible, regardless of money. Launching inside of eight days from now would be suicide.”
“They’re damaged up there, Vasily. Our astronaut… you’ve met him, by the way… Bill Campbell.”
“Yes, I have, but it doesn’t change the reality of what we can do.”
“They were hit by something, they’ve lost all comm, and apparently he can’t get the engine to light to kick him out of orbit. He’s flown through three chances we know he’d take.”
There’s a long stretch of silence and the two wait each other out, Vasily giving in first. “I already knew of this, Richard. John Kent called me and our people have been monitoring, too. But even if we could get there, you have no docking collars, no compatible hatches, and only one space suit. We can’t tow him back home.”
“We have an airlock. We can stuff a spare suit inside the lock. Bill gets the passenger ready and out, then takes the spare suit and comes out himself.”
“Perhaps. But it takes eight days, Richard. I’m sorry. Maybe NASA can move faster.”
“I’m begging, Vasily.”
“Don’t beg, my friend. It isn’t becoming. Unlike Shear, we would help if we could. But you knew the risks when you started your business, and we all warned you about rescues.”
Consciousness returns slowly. Dreamlike, fuzzy images of an upside-down cabin slowly coalesce until Kip realizes he’s floating in zero gravity around the ceiling, upside down in relation to the cabin floor. How long he’s been out he isn’t sure. He’s never blacked out before, except for one time as a kid when a larger classmate bounced
