Orbital Decay (45 page)

He felt himself smiling. It was clear now. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but… something Jack had said made things seem
clear
now, more sane than he had known in months. There
was
a way out! Not just for Jack and Bruce, but for him as well….

“Popeye.” Hamilton’s own voice had dropped, from spite to worried concern. “Popeye, are you all right. I’m sorry, I…”

“Never say sorry,” Hooker said. He let out his breath. “Someone close said that to me once. Never say sorry. Look back all you want, but don’t say you’re sorry.”

He pulled off his own headset and quickly reached for the gloves hanging from his suit utility belt. “Suit up,” he said. “Helmets too. You’re getting out of here in a couple of minutes.”

Compelled by the urgency in his voice, Hamilton and Virgin Bruce reached for their own gloves, unclasping them one at a time and thrusting their curled fists through the wrist rings. Then Jack looked up. “What do you mean, ‘
You’re
getting out of here’?”

Popeye’s eyes met Hamilton’s, and for a moment Popeye felt like breaking down and telling the hydroponics engineer—the first person he had met in many months whom he felt he could trust, or at least until the day before—everything that he felt and knew. Popeye blinked. No. The truth upon which he had stumbled could not be told to anyone.

“You’re going out on the
Willy Ley
,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m hitching another ride home.”

“W
HAT THE HELL ARE
you waiting for?” Dobbs demanded. “Rush that compartment and get ’em out of there!”

“Mr. Dobbs, we’ll do that,” Paul Edgar said calmly, “as soon as we’ve got the people in place and we know what we’re doing. Until then, you’re going to sit quietly and not tell my people what to do.”

The command module seemed twice as crowded as it actually was, mainly because its narrow interior was filled with Freedom Station personnel trying to keep control of the situation. Men and women were seated in front of the various stations, but most of the action was centered around the communications console, where several different conversations were going on at once: with Olympus Command, with Skycorp headquarters in Alabama, with the NASA military liaison at Cape Canaveral, and—unsuccessfully—with the three intruders who had forced their way into the NSA logistics module. The last was unsuccessful because no contact had been made with the interlopers, despite repeated attempts to reach them on the intercom system.

In fact, the hijacked module had been silent for the last few minutes. The radio signals which had been sent on several different frequencies to Olympus Command from the module had ceased, and no one on Olympus Station seemed to know what was going on any more than Freedom Command. Station Commander Paul Edgar had received a classified, coded message from the National Security Agency shortly after the crisis had begun; he had destroyed the message, printed on a sheet of flimsy, immediately after reading it, and had told his crew that they were to exercise extreme caution in dealing with the three strangers who had taken over the NSA module.

As for Dobbs, who had escaped to give Freedom’s command personnel their first warning of the crisis, he found himself in the irritating position of being ignored and shunted aside. Practically pushed into a corner of the command module, he could only watch as Edgar and the others tried to deal with the situation. Edgar had placed several crewmen by the sealed hatch leading to the access tunnel to the NSA module, but he was hesitant to have them unseal the hatch and storm the module.

“There’s reason to believe that those men are dangerous,” Edgar had explained to Dobbs minutes ago.

“Good God, man, I could have told you that,” Dobbs had retorted. “At least one of them is a maniac. We’ve got to get them out of there!”

Edgar had nodded his head slightly. “We’ll get them out of there, sir,” he had said in a voice which at once dutifully acknowledged Dobbs’ position as an important visitor representing both Skycorp and the U.S. Government, and diplomatically sought to remind Dobbs just who was in charge here. “But I won’t have either this station or its crew endangered. I want to first attempt to contact these men and negotiate with them. Get them to come out of there on their own accord. They don’t have much choice, so it’s in our favor.”

It had been a couple of minutes since then, and the officer who had repeatedly tried to make contact with the intruders had still failed to reach them. Dobbs sweated and clung to a handhold, trying to contain his anxiety. The thought of his personal responsibility for the logistics module, with its crucial and costly payload, had never escaped his mind.

“Skipper, I’ve got Olympus again,” the communications officer said. “They say they’ve had some problems of their own, probably related, and that the security officer aboard has made some arrests. They’re also searching for three missing crewmen—John Hamilton, Bruce Neiman, and Claude Hooker.”

Edgar glanced at Dobbs, and Dobbs nodded his head quickly. “That’s our boys,” Edgar replied. “Tell them we’ve got tentative identification and keep in touch.”

“Paul,
Willy Ley
is on final approach for docking,” the traffic engineer called over his shoulder. “Should I tell them to hold and make another orbit before they rendezvous?”

The station commander thought for a moment. “No, no, they might need that fuel,” he said. “Rendezvous and dock as planned, Charlie, but inform them we’ve got… Oh, hell, just tell ’em we’ve got an emergency and skip the details. Lisa and Steve will understand. I hope, anyway.”

He tapped the man at the intercom station on the shoulder. “What’s the scoop, Renaldo?”

“Nothing, Skipper. If they’re listening, they won’t tell us so.”

“Damnation,” Edgar muttered, leaning his hands on the back of Renaldo’s seat. He glanced once more at Dobbs, then turned back to the communications officer. “Okay, tell Patrick to wait a minute, then open that hatch and wait for my word.”

Renaldo punched a button on his console and said into his headset mike, “Code 21, this is Red Rider. Count from sixty and open it, but await go-code, repeat…”

Suddenly a loud, harsh buzz sounded from a station behind him and Edgar. As they both looked sharply around, the environmental engineer stared at her board and snapped, “Airlock Three depressurized and opening, sir! We read depressurization in AT-1 registering sudden pressure drop.” At that moment a warning Klaxon went off in the compartment.

“Explosive decompression?” Edgar shouted over the alarms.

“Negative!” she shouted back. “The airlock’s outer hatch has been opened, and the controls have been set for trickle decompression of the access tunnel.” As she shouted, her eyes flicked across the readouts and her hands flew across the panel’s switches. “All compartments sealed!” she shouted. “Pressure dropping to 4 psi in AT-1, all other compartments registering minimal drop!”

“What?” Edgar shouted. He then yelled to no one in particular, “Shut the alarms off! How is…”

“Skipper, it’s Patrick and his men!” Renaldo snapped. “They can’t get their hatch open!”

Hamilton wanted to squeeze his eyes tightly shut and at the same time keep them wide open. Earth lay below his feet like a vast, curving plain. Although his mind told him quite reasonably that he couldn’t fall those 300 miles to the cloud-flecked West African veldt below, his hands were locked in a death grip on the magnetic plates which held him to the outer surface of the space station.

Jack.
Virgin Bruce’s voice crackled through his helmet’s earphones. He was about ten feet ahead of Hamilton, making his own way hand-over-hand across a module, toward the aluminum truss which ran the length of Freedom Station.

“Right behind you, Bruce,” Hamilton said, hearing himself gasping hollowly in the confines of his helmet.

Don’t look at the Earth
,
Jack. Just concentrate on your hands and keep your eyes straight ahead.

“Right.” Hamilton jerked his gaze away from the planet, looked up at his gloved hands and the magnetic grippers clasped in each hand. The grippers had come from a locker Virgin Bruce had found near the airlock through which they had exited; they were normally used by inspection and repair crews who were working
EVA
and didn’t want to fool with either tethers or MMU backpacks. He released the thumb of his right hand from the button on the gripper’s handle, moved the gripper forward a few feet, and pushed the button again; the gripper’s electromagnetic charge held to the metal skin of the module. Then he released the button on the left-hand gripper, swung it in front of the right hand, and pushed the button again.

Hurry it up.
Virgin Bruce said.
I can see the shuttle. It’s on final approach now. No
,
don’t look for it
!
Just keep your mind on getting to the truss. We’ve got to get to that thing before they figure out what we’re up to.

“We’re not going to make it,” Hamilton said. Their progress with the grippers was slow, only a few feet at a time, and at least a hundred feet separated them from the docking bay where
Willy Ley
would connect with Freedom. In the time limit to which they were confined, there was no way that they could make it.

We’ll get there
, Virgin Bruce replied.
Once we get to the truss we can get rid of these things and the climb will be much quicker. But you’ve got to
…

Suddenly they both felt a small but violent jarring of the station’s superstructure, as if something had just smacked into Freedom. At first Hamilton thought it was
Willy Ley
making an exceptionally hard dock. Then he looked down at Earth again.

A long, fat cylinder was moving away from the station, trailing bits of metal and fiberglass debris which glistened with reflected sunlight. It only took him a moment to recognize the cylinder as being one of the space station’s modules, and he knew which module it was.

“Adios, Popeye,” he said.

The firing of the explosive bolts had been a little more violent than Hooker had anticipated. Seconds after he had thrown the detonating switch and hit the timer, he had grabbed onto handholds with both hands and had silently counted back from ten. The engineers who had designed the modules—which were essentially the same as Olympus modules, although with some important variations—had apparently left nothing to chance when they had added the emergency option for module separation. The explosions kicked the Ear module completely free of Freedom Station, and they also nearly kicked Hooker’s teeth out of his head.

At the instant the module sheared away from the station, the lights went out inside the module as the power connection was severed. Hooker had already donned his helmet and gloves and had repressurized his suit. He now flicked on his helmet lamps and went immediately to work on the next, crucial phase of his desperate ploy.

Uncoiling a nylon cord from his utility belt, he quickly looped one end around a ceiling handhold, knotted it, then did the same with the other end through the tether ring on the front of his suit. After testing both knots, he then pushed himself toward the module’s sealed hatch. Grabbing the locking arm with both hands, he pushed it down, unlocking the hatch, then did a backward half gainer and kicked the hatch open with both feet.

Instant decompression flung all the loose objects in the module through the hatch. The silent explosion would have thrown Hooker out into space as well had it not been for the rope. His chest hit a console and he grabbed in the darkness for something to hold onto against the torrent. His fingers fell across and instinctively snagged a foot restraint. Hooker held on tight, and turned his head around inside his helmet to watch as a communications headset—probably the one which Hamilton had thrown at him in anger—whipped through the hatch like a mass of ganglia.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the rush of air ceased. Vacuum had replaced the module’s atmosphere. Hooker released the foot restraint and pushed himself toward the open hatch to look outside.

The module was now in a slow tumble, end over end, and he saw Freedom Station swing up and away, far away now, its tiny lights and Erector-set construction making it look like an elaborate kid’s toy. Earth then swam into view, much closer than it had been before.

Popeye smiled. So far, so good. The sudden decompression had given the Ear module that extra boost it needed to greatly reduce the likelihood of its being recaptured by a tug from the station. Now it was plummeting down Earth’s gravity well, following a course of orbital decay which would bring it to a fiery end in the upper atmosphere. Hooker figured that the trip would take about ten or fifteen minutes.

“And now it’s your turn, Sweet Pea,” he murmured to himself. Hooker had no intention of escorting the nerve center of Big Ear to its death by friction. Although, he knew, his only alternative for escape was less suicidal only by a matter of degrees.

Turning his back to the hatch and pushing himself further into the module, he searched with his hands and his helmet lamps until he found the candy-striped locker he had spotted before. It was marked with a red arrow reading
ESCAPE.
He twisted the recessed locking wheel and lowered the compartment’s door. Inside was a trunk-sized package wrapped in clear, heavy-duty plastic. Hooker unsnapped the securing belts, unzipped the plastic bag, and reached inside as his mind raced across details he recalled from a technical briefing he had received at Skycorp’s training center at Cape Canaveral.

During the formative years of manned space exploration—even before the disasters and near-disasters which had plagued the American and Soviet space programs during the first decades of the push—NASA had been developing ways of rescuing astronauts stranded in space. One was the rescue ball, which became standard equipment aboard American spacecraft in the 80s. Another method was one which was kicked around for decades by designers before finally becoming accepted around the year 2000. It was developed by NASA but considered by them too unsafe to use. Then, private industry further refined it and began putting it aboard manned spacecraft used in LEO operations. At first NASA’s regulators hemmed and hawed at the idea, until it was pointed out that for an astronaut, in a life or death situation, a slim chance of survival was better than no chance at all.