their differing orbits would automatically begin to pull them farther apart.
Jill heard the whomp of the thrusters firing and felt the orbiter shudder as Kittredge, at the aft controls, slowly backed them apart.
His hand shook, and his face went tight with the effort to retain control of his grip. He, not the computer, was flying orbiter, and a wayward jerk of the control stick could send them careening off course.
Five feet apart. Ten. They were past the crucial separation phase now, moving further and further away from the station.
Jill began to relax.
And then she heard the shriek on middeck. A cry of horror and disbelief.
She turned, just as a gruesome fountain of human debris burst onto the flight deck and exploded toward her.
Kittredge, nearest the interdeck access, caught the brunt of the force and went flying against the rotational hand controller. Jill tumbled backward, her headset flying off, her body pummeled by foul-smelling fragments of intestine and skin and clumps of black hair, still attached to scalp. Kenichi's hair. She heard the noise of firing thrusters, and the orbiter seemed to lurch around her. A cloud of disintegrated human parts had spread throughout the flight deck, and a nightmarish galaxy swirled, floating bits of plastic shroud and shattered organs and those strange greenish clumps.
A grapelike mass of them floated by and splattered against a wall.
When droplets collide with, and adhere to, flat surfaces in microgravity, they tremble briefly from the impact, then fall still. The splatter had not stopped moving.
In disbelief, she watched as the quivering intensified, as a ripple disturbed the surface. Only then did she see, embedded within the gelatinous mass, a core of something black, something moving. It writhe like the larva of a mosquito.
Suddenly a new image caught her eye, even more startling. She stared up through the window above the flight deck and saw the space station rapidly zooming toward them, so close now she could almost make out the rivets on the solar array truss.
In a burst of panic, she shoved against the wall and dove through that gruesome cloud of exploded flesh, her arms outstretched in desperation toward the orbiter control stick.
'Collision course!' yelled Griggs over space-to-space radio.
'Discovery, you are on a collision course!' There was no response.
'Discovery! Reverse course!' Emma watched in horror as disaster hurtled toward them.
Through the space station's cupola window, she saw the orbiter simultaneously pitch up and roll to starboard. She saw Discovery's delta wing slicing toward them with enough momentum to ram it through the station's aluminum hull. She saw, in the imminent collision, the approach of her own death.
The plumes of firing rockets suddenly spewed out from the forward RCS thruster in the orbiter's nose. Discovery began to pitch downward, reversing momentum. Simultaneously the starboard delta wing rolled upward, but not quickly enough to clear the station's main solar truss.
She felt her heartbeat freeze.
Heard Luther whisper, 'Lord Jesus.'
'CRV!' Griggs shouted in panic. 'Every one to the evac vehicle!
Arms and legs churned in midair, feet flying in every direction as the crew scrambled to evacuate the node. Nicolai and Luther were first through the hatch, into the hab. Emma had just grabbed the hatch handhold when her ears filled with the squeal of rending metal, the groan of aluminum being twisted and deformed by the collision of two massive objects.
The space station shuddered, and in the ensuing quake, she caught a disorienting glimpse of the node walls tilting away, of Griggs's Thinkpad spinning in midair and Diana's terrified face, slick with sweat.
The lights flickered and went out. In the darkness, a red warning light flashed on and off, on and off.
A siren shrieked.
Shuttle flight director Randy Carpenter was watching death on the front screen.
At the instant of the orbiter's impact, he felt the blow as surely as if a fist had been rammed into his own sternum, and he actually lifted his hand and pressed it to his chest.
For a few seconds, the Flight Control Room went absolutely silent.
Stunned faces stared at the front wall. On the center was the world map with the shuttle trajectory trace. To the right the frozen RPOP display, Discovery and ISS represented by wireframe diagrams. The orbiter was now melded like a crumpled toy the silhouette of ISS. Carpenter felt his lungs suddenly expand, realized that, in his horror, he had forgotten to breathe.
The FCR erupted in chaos.
'Flight, we have no voice downlink,' he heard Capcom say.
'Discovery is not responding.'
'Flight, we're still getting data stream from TCS -- '
'Flight, no drop in orbiter cabin pressure. No indication of oxygen leak -- '
'What about ISS?' Carpenter snapped. 'Do we have downlink from them?' SVO's trying to hail them. The station pressure is dropping -- '
'How low?'
'It's down to seven hundred ten ... six hundred ninety. Shit, they're decompressing fast!'
Breach in the station's hull! thought Carpenter.
But that wasn't his problem to fix, it belonged to Special Vehicle Operations, the hall.
The propulsion systems engineer suddenly broke into the comm loop.
'Flight, I'm reading RCS ignition, F2U, F3U, and F1U. Someone's working the orbiter controls.' Carpenter's head snapped to attention. The RPOP display was still locked and frozen, with no new images appearing. But Propulsion's report told him that Discovery's steering rockets had fired. It had to be more than just a random discharge, the crew trying to move the orbiter away from ISS. But until they had radio downlink, they could not confirm the orbiter crew's status. They could not confirm they were alive.
It was the most terrible scenario of all, the one he feared most.
A dead crew on an orbiting shuttle. Though Houston could control most of the orbiter's maneuvers by ground command, they could not bring it home without crew help. A functioning human being was necessary to flip the arming switches for the OMS deorbit burn.
It took a human hand to deploy the air-data probes and to lower the landing gear for touchdown. Without someone at the controls to perform these functions, Discovery would remain in orbit, a ghost ship circling silently around the earth until its orbit decayed from now, and it fell to earth in a streak of fire. It was this that passed through Carpenter's head as the seconds ticked by, as panic slowly gathered force around him in the FCR. He could not afford to think about the space station, whose crew even now might be in the agonal throes of a decompressive death. His focus had to remain on Discovery. On his crew, whose survival seemed less and less likely with every second of silence that passed.
Then, suddenly, they heard the voice. Faint, halting.
'Control, this is Discovery. Houston. Houston ... '
'It's Hewitt!' said Capcom. 'Go ahead, Discovery!'
' ... major anomaly ... could not avoid collision. damage to orbiter appears minimal ... '
'Discovery, we need visual on ISS.'
'Can't deploy Ku antenna -- closed circuit gone -- '
'Do you know the extent of their damage?'
'Impact tore off their solar truss. I think we punched a hole in their hull ... ' Carpenter felt sick. They still had heard no word from the ISS crew. No confirmation they had survived.
'What is your crew's status?' asked Capcom.
'Kittredge is barely responding. Hit his head on the aft control panel. And the crew on middeck -- I don't know about them -- '
'What's your status, Hewitt?'
'Trying to ... oh, God, my head ... ' There was a soft sob.
