Apollo's Outcasts (8 page)

No
, I thought.
That can't be a missile
.

"I need to go forward again, start laying in the coordinates for the next burn." Gordie glanced at Eddie. "A burn is when I fire the main engine," he quickly added, and Eddie nodded. "Unless there's any more questions..."

"Gordie?" I didn't look away from the window. "You might want to see this."

Gordie glanced my way, almost as if irritated that I'd interrupted him. Then he pulled himself over to the window next to mine. For a second or two he said nothing as he peered out. Then his mouth fell open in astonishment and he threw himself back from the window.

"Get in your seats and strap down!" he snapped. "Do it now!"

"Why?" Melissa stared at him. "What's...?"

"Just do it!" Grabbing at the ceiling, Gordie launched himself toward the cockpit. "Coming through!" he yelled, pushing Nina and Eddie out of the way. "Make a hole!"

"It's a missile," I said. Gordie's reaction had confirmed my suspicions. "Someone down there has launched a rocket at us."

"Are you sure?" Logan gaped at me, then hauled himself over to the window Gordie had just vacated.

I glanced out my window again. Although the rising star was still far away, it was getting brighter, and its upward direction suggested that it was on a trajectory that would intercept us in less than a minute.

"Yes, I'm sure!" Gordie hastily turned himself so that he fell into the cockpit feet first; within seconds he was in the pilot's seat, snatching at the seat and shoulder straps and buckling them together. "That's an anti-satellite weapon. Probably air-launched by another F-30 sent up from Texas. They haven't given up on us yet.
Now get in your damn seats!"

We scrambled to obey him, but none of us were prepared for this, so all we managed to do was get tangled in each other's arms and legs. I was trying to get MeeMee's feet out of my face when there was a hollow roar from the stern, and in the next instant an invisible hand shoved all of us toward the compartment's rear end. Gordie had fired the main engine; a second later, the entire LTV seemed to roll sideways, and I realized that he was firing the maneuvering thrusters as well.

He was trying to dodge the ASW. No time to get back in the cocoon; I grabbed the ceiling rung with both hands and hoped that our pilot knew what he was doing.

"C'mon, baby, c'mon." Logan floated above the seat row in front of me, clutching at the top of one of them as he stared out the nearest porthole. "Climb, climb, climb..."

"What's going on?" Melissa was trying to get into the seat beside my cocoon, but its straps were hopelessly snarled, and every effort she made to untangle them only made it worse. "Are we going to die? We're going to die, aren't we...?"

"Shut up!" Gordie yelled. "Nobody's dying! Not if I can help it!"

His bravado might have been assuring, but it came too late. Eddie's earlier giddiness was forgotten as he let out a terrified scream. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I just wanna go home...!"

"It's all right. It's okay." Nina pushed her brother into one of the forward seats, then wrapped her small arms around him and held him
tight. "We're going to be fine," she said quietly, and in that moment she seemed more like a mother than a little sister. "Hush, now. We're going to be okay..."

The only other person remaining calm--or at least not panicking, as MeeMee and Eddie were--was Hannah. She was crammed between a seatback and a bulkhead by Logan's legs, unable to strap herself down, but she didn't seem to care. Her eyes were shut, and she seemed to be saying something under her breath. Praying? Probably. Then her eyes opened, and she caught me looking at her. There was fear in her eyes, but something else as well: resignation to an inevitable fate.

She looked at me, and her mouth opened and her lips formed one silent word:
Sorry
.

I was still wondering why she'd say that--this wasn't her fault, was it?--when Logan yelled, "There it goes!"

Twisting my neck, I ducked my head to peer through the window again, just in time to see a brilliant, utterly soundless flash of light. The anti-satellite weapon had just detonated. How far away, I didn't know; all I could tell was that it exploded somewhere below and off to the port side of the LTV.

"It's a miss!" I shouted. "It didn't hit!"

A loud, sharp
bang!
that sounded like someone firing a pistol, and I knew at once that I was wrong.

A second later an alarm shrieked from the cockpit, followed by a loud curse from Gordie. "Blowout!" he shouted. "We've got a blowout!"

He didn't have to explain what he meant. The ASW had detonated close enough to throw debris our way, and the bang we'd heard was a fragment penetrating the LTV's outer hull and fuselage. The alarm was the decompression alert, signaling that the spacecraft was losing air.

"Oh my God!" Melissa's scream was even louder than the alarm. "Oh...my...God!"

"Shut up!" Logan shoved himself away from the porthole, began to look around. "Where's the hole? Where did it...?"

"Look for it!" Gordie snapped. "It's gotta be around there somewhere." He switched off the alarm, but remained where he was in the cockpit. "You're going to have to find it and button it down! I've got my hands full!"

It wasn't until then that I realized the LTV had begun to tumble like a washing machine drum. True to Newton's third law, the fragment's impact had caused an equal and opposite reaction; with the escaping air pressure acting as a jet, the spacecraft was now rolling sideways. If Gordie didn't get our craft under control and fast, the LTV's orbit would decay and we'd commence a long, fatal plunge into Earth's upper atmosphere.

It was up to us to locate the source of the blowout. But even with the alarm shut off, it was almost impossible to tell where the hull had been breached. I couldn't hear a hissing sound, nor was there an obvious hole.

Eddie was in hysterics, and MeeMee wasn't helping much either. So when Hannah spoke up, her calm voice was almost lost in the din. "I think I found what did it," she said, and I looked around to see her holding up a small, jagged piece of metal about half the size of my little finger.

"Where did it come from?" I asked.

"I don't know. It bounced off here--" she pointed to the bulkhead above her head, on the starboard side of the compartment "--right after we heard the bang."

"That means it's gotta be around here somewhere..."

"Whatever you're going to do, guys, you better do it fast." Gordie wasn't shouting anymore, but his voice was still tense. "At this rate, we're going to lose our air in five minutes."

"You find the hole. I'll get the repair kit." Logan launched himself
down the center aisle toward a bulkhead locker marked Emergency. "Is this where it is, skipper?"

"You got it." Gordie took a second to glance over his shoulder. "Pull the handle up, then pull it down...that's how it opens. And don't call me skipper...I hate that."

I might have laughed if the situation hadn't been so serious. Instead, I was trying to figure out how to locate the breach. Hannah's finding the fragment helped a little--it meant the hole was closer to the rear of the spacecraft than the front--but it only gave me a general direction in which to look.

The hole could be anywhere. Worse than that, given the size of the fragment, it was probably no larger than the diameter of a pen. Easy to seal, but hard to find. And Gordie wasn't kidding when he said that we were quickly losing pressure; I swallowed, and felt my ears pop.

"Everyone, look around," I said, trying to stay calm. "Look for the hole." Melissa was still weeping, and I grabbed her shoulder and shook her hard. "You too. Stop crying and help me look."

"Oh, why don't you climb back in your little cocoon and shut up!" Her face was screwed up in terror, and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. "At least you'll have air in there!"

She was wrong, of course; the cocoon wasn't airtight, and even if it was, I wouldn't have lived very much longer than anyone else. I was about to tell her this when I noticed something peculiar: in zero-g, her tears were forming tiny bubbles that drifted away from her face. Floating in midair, as if caught by...

An air current. The sort that would be caused by a hull breach.

"That's it!" I yelled, still staring at my sister. "That's how to find it!"

MeeMee glared at me. "What are you...?"

Ignoring her, I pushed myself toward the aft bulkhead hatch marked Galley and yanked it open. The compartment on the other side of the hatch was no more than a cubbyhole, barely large enough for one person. It took only a second to find what I needed: a locker containing a couple of dozen half-liter bottles of water.

I snatched a water bottle from the galley and kicked myself back into the passenger compartment. By then, Logan had retrieved a plastic case from the emergency locker and had returned to the rear of the passenger compartment. "I got the seal kit," he said, then stared at me in bewilderment. "Hey, man, you picked a hell of a time to get a drink of..."

"Watch." I pried open the cap nozzle, pointed the bottle away from me, and squeezed. Water spurted from the nozzle and instantly coalesced into a thick, steady stream of bubbles, each perfectly spherical if not identical in size.

"What are you doing?" Melissa screeched like a cat who was about to get wet. "This is no time to be playing with...!"

"No! He's right!" Logan caught on; he grabbed a ceiling rail and pulled himself back from the water bubbles, making sure that he wasn't in their way. "Watch where they're going!"

The stream dispersed, becoming a cloud...and then the bubble cloud began to move, caught by air currents we couldn't feel but which nonetheless influenced the bubbles' direction. The LTV was no longer rolling--Gordie had regained control of the craft, at least for the moment--so there was no other force to act upon the bubbles.

The bubbles floated downward, slowly at first, then picking up speed as they moved toward the floor. As we watched, they began to form a spiral, much like a tiny waterspout, that jetted toward a spot in the aisle just past the edge of Logan's seat, across the aisle from where Hannah had been during the blowout. The airborne whirlpool disappeared through a tiny hole in the floor, the place where the fragment had punched through.

"That's it," I murmured. "There's where it is."

Logan opened the seal kit. Inside was a cylindrical object that faintly resembled a chalk gun and a set of flat, cellophane-wrapped patches of different sizes. I held the box while he quickly read the instructions printed on the inside of the lid, then he removed the gun and bent over to insert its pointed barrel into the hole. When he pulled the trigger, pink gunk that looked like chewing gum
jetted into the hole. It filled the hole, stopping the remaining water bubbles--and the air--from escaping. The gunk hardened immediately; once it was solid, Logan selected a small patch about two inches in diameter. Tearing open its wrapper, he removed the cover from the adhesive backing and firmly pressed the patch against the sealed hole. The patch was made of some polymer as tough as the metal around it; it stuck to the hole, making it airtight.

"We're no longer losing pressure," Gordie called from the cockpit. "But let's be safe and check and see if there's not any more holes."

I moved through the cabin, squirting a little more water here and there. The bubbles lingered in midair, though, and didn't form any more waterspouts. "I think that's the only one," I said.

Gordie let out his breath as a long, relieved sigh. "That's as close as I ever want to get," he muttered, then he turned his head to look back at us. "Well done, guys...especially you two," he added, meaning Logan and me. "I don't know what I would've done without you."

I nodded, then looked over at Logan. He didn't smile as he packed the sealant gun back into the box. "Why did they fire that ASW at us?" he asked. "That's what I'd like to know."

"I've made the lunar trajectory burn," Gordie said, as if he hadn't heard him. "They're not going to be able to try that stunt again...we're out of range."

"I want to know the same thing." Melissa had calmed down again; so had Eddie, although he still clung to Nina for comfort. "Why did they try to shoot us down? Why are we so important that they'd want to kill us?"

For once, I had to agree with her. First the F-30s that had chased the shuttle after it took off from Wallops Island, then an anti-satellite weapon fired by another fighter. Seemed like someone was going to a lot of trouble just to stop a few kids from going to the Moon.

Gordie didn't reply for a moment or two. "I'm sure they've got a reason," he said at last, not looking back at us. "Anyway...we're safe, and that's what counts."

Logan and I traded a glance. Neither of us said anything, but I could tell we shared the same thought: something was going on that Gordie didn't want to talk about. I looked over at Hannah. She was smiling at me, her gratitude obvious. Then her expression darkened and she quickly looked away, as if trying to avoid answering the same question Gordie had refused to answer.