Kittredge pulled Emma into a hug and whispered, 'Next mission, Watson, you're my first choice.' When they separated, she was crying.
It ended with the traditional handshake between the two commanders, Kittredge and Griggs. Emma caught one last glimpse of the orbiter crew -- her crew -- waving goodbye, and then the hatches swung shut. Though Discovery would remain attached to ISS for another twenty-four hours while its crew rested and prepared for undocking, the closing of those airtight hatches effectively ended human contact between them. They were once again separate vehicles, temporarily attached, like two dragonflies hurtling in a mating dance through space.
Pilot Jill Hewitt was having trouble getting to sleep.
Insomnia was new to her. Even on the night before a launch, she could manage to drop off cleanly into a deep sleep, trusting a lifetime of good luck to carry her through the next day. It was point of pride for her that she'd never needed a sleeping pill. were for nervous Nellies who fretted about a thousand awful possibilities. For the neurotics and obsessives. As a naval pilot, Jill had known more than her share of mortal danger. She'd flown missions over Iraq, had landed a crippled jet on a heaving carrier, had ejected into a stormy sea. She figured she'd cheated Death so many times that surely he'd given up on her and gone home in defeat.
And so she usually slept just fine at night.
But tonight, sleep was not coming. It was because of the corpse.
No one wanted to be near it. Though the privacy panel was shut, concealing the body, they all felt its presence. Death had entered their living space, cast its shadow over their evening meal, their usual jokes. It was the unwanted fifth member of their crew. As though to escape it, Kittredge, O'Leary, and Mercer had abandoned their usual sleep stations and had moved up to the flight deck. Only Jill remained on the middeck, as though to prove to the men that she was less squeamish than they were, that she, woman, wasn't bothered by a corpse.
But now, with the cabin lights dimmed, she found that sleep was eluding her. She kept thinking about what lay beyond that closed-off panel.
About Kenichi Hirai, when he was alive.
She remembered him quite vividly as pale and soft-spoken, with black hair stiff as wire. Once, in weightlessness training, had brushed against his hair and had been surprised by its boarlike bristliness. She wondered what he looked like now. She felt a sudden, sickening curiosity about what had become of his face, changes Death had wrought. It was the same curiosity that used to compel her, as a child, to poke twigs into the corpses of the animals she sometimes encountered in the woods.
She decided to move further away from the body.
She brought her sleep restraint bag to the port side and anchored it behind the flight-deck access ladder. It was as far as she could get, yet still be on the same deck. Once again she zipped herself into the bag. Tomorrow she would need every reflex, every brain cell, to be operating at peak performance for reentry and landing. Through sheer strength of will, she forced herself a deepening trance.
She was asleep when the swirl of iridescent liquid began to seep through Kenichi Hirai's shroud.
It had begun with a few glistening droplets oozing through a tiny rent in the plastic, torn open when the shroud had snagged. For hours the pressure had been building, the plastic slowly inflating the contents swelled. Now the breach widened, and a shimmering ribbon streamed out.
Escaping through the pallet ventilation holes, the ribbon broke apart into blue-green droplets that briefly danced in weightless abandon before recongealing into large globules that undulated in the dimly lit cabin. The opalescent fluid continued spill forth. The globules spread, riding the gentle currents of circulating air. Drifting across the cabin, they found their way to the limp form of Jill Hewitt, who slept unaware of the shimmering cloud enveloping her, unaware of the mist she inhaled with every soft breath or of the droplets that settled like condensation on face. Only briefly did she stir, to brush the tickle on her cheek the opalescent drops slid toward her eye.
Rising with the air currents, the dancing droplets passed through the opening of the interdeck access and began to spread through the gloom of the flight deck, where three men drifted in the utter relaxation of weightless sleep.
August 8.
The ominous swirl had begun to take shape over the eastern Caribbean days before. It had started as a short wave trough aloft, a gentle undulation of clouds formed from the evaporated waters of the sun-baked equatorial sea. Butting up against a bank of air from the north, the clouds had begun to rotate, spinning a calm eye of dry air. Now it was a definite spiral that seemed to grow with every new image transmitted by the geostationary GOES weather satellite. The NOM National Weather Service had been tracking it since its birth, had watched as it meandered, directionless, off the eastern end of Cuba. Now the newest buoy data was coming in, with measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction. This data reinforced what the meteorologists were now seeing on their computer screens.
It was a tropical storm. And it was moving northwest, toward the tip of Florida.
This was the sort of news shuttle flight director Randy Carpenter dreaded. They could tinker with engineering problems. They could troubleshoot multiple systems failures. But against the forces of Mother Nature, they were helpless. The primary concern of this morning's mission management team meeting was a go-no-go decision on deorbit, and they had planned for shuttle undocking and deorbit burn in six hours' time. The weather briefing changed everything.
'NOAA Spaceflight Meteorology Group reports the tropical storm is moving north-northwest, bearing toward the Florida Keys,' said the forecaster.
'Radar from Patrick Air Force Base Nexrad Doppler from the National Weather Service in Melbourne show radial wind velocities of up to sixty-five knots, with intensifying rain. Rawinsonde balloon and Jimsphere balloon both confirm. Also, both the Field Mill network around Canaveral as well as LDAR show increasing lightning activity. These conditions will probably continue for the next forty-eight hours.
Possibly longer.'
'In other words,' said Carpenter, 'we're not landing at Kennedy.'
'Kennedy is definitely out. At least for the next three to four days.' Carpenter sighed. 'Okay, we sorta guessed that was coming. Let's hear about Edwards.' Edwards Air Force Base, tucked into a valley east of the Sierra Nevada in California, was not their first choice. A landing at Edwards delayed shuttle processing and turnaround for the next mission because the shuttle would have to be transported back to Kennedy, piggybacked to a 747.
'Unfortunately,' said the forecaster, 'there's a problem with Edwards as well.' A knot had formed in Carpenter's stomach. A premonition that this was the beginning of a bad chain of events. As lead shuttle flight director, he had made it his personal mission to review any mishap on record and analyze what had gone wrong. With the advantage of hindsight, he could usually trace the problem backward, through a succession of bad but seemingly innocuous decisions. Sometimes it started back at the factory with a technician, a miswired panel. Hell, even something as big and expensive as the Hubble Telescope lens had started off screwed up from the very beginning.
Now he could not shake off the feeling that he would later think back to this very meeting and ask himself, What should I have done differently?
What could I have done to prevent a catastrophe?
He asked, 'What are the conditions at Edwards?'
'Currently they're looking at a cloud ceiling at seven thousand feet.'
'That's an automatic no-go.'
'Right. So much for sunny California. But there's the possibility of partial clearing within the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. We might have reasonable landing conditions if we just wait it out. Otherwise, it's off to New Mexico we go. I just checked MIDDS, and White Sands looks good. Clear skies, head winds at five to ten knots. No adverse weather forecast.'
'So it's down to a choice,' said Carpenter. 'Wait till Edwards clears up. Or go for White Sands.' He looked
