Orbit

Chapter 34

Once the “Enter” key is pressed, she knows there will be no going back.

Dorothy Sheehan thinks over the steps again, restraining herself from sending the benign bit of computer code into the system until she’s as certain as she can be that all bases are covered. The entire assignment has been an exhilarating contest of wills, a shadow fight between Griggs Hopewell and herself, but she’s thinking ahead to the good life to follow in the Beltway, with only an office job and real weekends to herself. Of course maybe she won’t be happy unless she’s walking a tightrope somewhere. Her years with the CIA were terrifying and wonderful at the same time, mainly wonderful because she never ended up caught or compromised.

Okay. Here goes.

Amazing, she thinks, how the tiny click of a key can be the beginning of a causal chain that blocks a billion-dollar launch. She waits for the tiny string of computer code to add itself to the appropriate program and gets the return message before signing off and shutting down. If it works as planned, the minute alteration will disrupt things just long enough to scrub the launch, the code alteration then disappearing.

At least, in theory that’s the way it should go. And if it does, Geoff Shear will have to follow through on his promises.

Dorothy carefully wipes off the keyboard and anything she’s touched before moving back to the door of the empty office, one she selected some days before on learning the normal occupant was out of town.

She thinks back to the close call last night and the wisdom of always figuring out from the outside of a hotel which is her window and checking for lights when she comes back. Otherwise she would have walked right in on whomever Hopewell had sent to search her laptop. There was nothing to find, of course, and she hadn’t planned to use it for a mainframe insertion, anyway. Much too risky, and for the past forty-eight hours she’s hoped that one or more of the legitimate problems she’s found can be accelerated into an aborted launch.

But she’s found that Griggs Hopewell comes by his can-do reputation honestly, and item by item, problem by problem, he’s kept working his magic and driving his team, four hours before liftoff, with everything still a go.

She waits with the office door cracked slightly until she’s sure the hallway is clear, then slips out. Her temporary office in an adjacent building is sufficient for monitoring what’s happening, but its computer terminal absolutely can’t be used outside the boundaries.

Dorothy chuckles at the thought of the people waiting right now to catch her computer’s numeric signature entering the mainframe. They’ll be waiting in vain, of course, but their trap was cleverly laid, and when she got bored enough to go look for it on the mainframe, she almost didn’t find it.

She checks her watch—8:12 A.M. Eastern. The slightly delayed Chinese launch should be happening right now. She knows Shear will be calling the President for permission to scrub the second someone else achieves orbit, and if so, the little adjustment she made may never even make an appearance before it evaporates.

The possibility that Hopewell and company might somehow defeat her, or worse, catch her in the act, is unfortunately part of the game. And she fears that if she gets in trouble, Shear will turn on her completely and play mister innocent while she twists in the wind.

But that’s not going to happen, Dorothy thinks. All my bases are covered. And besides, I’m not forcing anyone to make a no-go launch decision. I’m just helping them with their rationale, and saving the nation one hell of a lot of money in the process.

For perhaps the first time since his voyage began, Kip wakes up without falling.

He is falling, of course—continuously around the planet—his Newtonian tendency to travel in a straight line continuously warped into an orbital curve by the centripetal force of gravity pulling him down at the same rate inertia tries to take him straight on into space.

Kip rubs his eyes, aware he’s getting comfortable with his weightlessness, this feeling of floating. He lets some of the explanations from high school physics replay until he’s jarred back to reality.

Oh my God, this is day five, isn’t it?

According to the scrubber charts—and he’s checked them dozens of times—there can’t be a day six.

The panic buzzing in his head is almost overwhelming and he closes his eyes, trying to fight back hysteria. The fifth day is no longer an inestimable series of sunrises and sunsets in the future. It’s today. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours it ends.

And so does he.

I’m going to die today, Kip tells himself, but the words in his head aren’t believable enough, so he speaks them out loud, having to clear his throat to finish.

“I’m going to… I’m going to die today. So, what do I think about that?”

Reality sucks, is what I think! But there’s no humor in a line that usually makes him chuckle.

I thought I was resigned to this. I thought I was ready.

But if so, why are his hands shaking? He’s known for four days he wasn’t going to make it, but facing it now overwhelms him.

He forces a deep breath, suddenly remembering he should carefully sample the air first. But either the odor from Bill’s decomposing remains has abated or he’s become used to it. In any event he thinks he can last the day now without a spacewalk. After all, he thinks, a spacewalk would be a very dangerous thing to try.

Wait a minute! Dangerous? Jesus!

He’s actually embarrassed that he’s sitting here with hours left to live and worrying that a spacewalk might be an unsafe thing to do.

So what if it’s dangerous? I could play with matches today, run with scissors, insult a serial killer, or rat on the mafia with complete impunity!

At least he’s coaxed a chuckle out of himself.

He’s read that death row inmates, no matter how brazen and sociopathic, lose their bravado just before execution, and he sees why. It’s not hypothetical anymore. Leaving this life and this body is about to be his new reality. Every human’s fear of what lies on the other side drowns all the neat Biblical assurances in a tsunami of doubt.

Kip works to control his breathing, which has become fast and shallow. He feels his heart rate declining.

This is my last chance to say whatever I want to say, he thinks. He’s typed so much—hundreds of pages if he includes what he erased—he needs to go back and read it. But there’s no time.

What happens, he wonders, when scrubbers saturate? Will he just suddenly feel light-headed? Will he keel over? Or will it be long and agonizing?

He catches sight of the unfolded emergency space suit floating near Bill’s bagged remains and wonders why the idea of putting it on and going outside is tugging at him. Should he do it to die out there? Would it be any easier?

No, something else, some reason that he almost recalls from a dream and can’t put his finger on.

The tool kit, that’s it!

The suit has a small tool kit like nothing he’s seen before. They showed the components in ground school but he barely paid attention. Now he turns and pulls the suit to him, searching for the correct pocket and pulling out the silver-plated kit.

That is what I remember! he thinks, finding a pair of wire clippers and three colors of electrical tape along with several garden-variety wire nuts. The thought about a spacewalk wasn’t for hurrying his demise, it was all about trying to repair whatever had been screwed up by the object that hit them.

He can visualize himself wiggling into the suit, figuring out how to pressurize it, stuffing himself in the tight little airlock, and floating outside. Maybe another meteor will get him, fast and painlessly. Or cosmic rays sterilize him (not that there’s any chance of that being a problem now). And he’d be doing all that struggling to play in-flight mechanic? Get real.

Yet he thinks, it’s like guzzling chicken soup for a cold. It may not help, but it can’t hurt.

Whether the fatigue he feels suddenly is emotional he can’t tell, but the thought of flailing around trying to put on that complicated pressure suit is exhausting, and he decides not to decide for a few hours. After all, there’s another delectable cereal bar and much more to write before he’s ready to think about trying. And maybe it would be a lot more comfortable just to stay inside and slip away slowly.

But there it is again, that misguided feeling of hope, a glimmer that there could be some way out he hadn’t considered as he turns back to the keyboard.

The fact that it’s ten minutes past nine and his phone hasn’t rung can’t be good.

Geoff Shear opens the tiny instrument and finds the symbol that confirms the ringer is set to on. It is.

The Chinese Long March missile boosting their crew capsule into low Earth orbit should have cycled through first- and second-stage cutout by now and their astronaut—all by himself in a three-person craft—should be approaching orbital velocity.

The cell phone suddenly corks off, startling Geoff who didn’t realize he was that jumpy. The practiced act of sweeping the phone toward his face while flipping it open is completely unconscious.

“Yes?”

“The Chinese scrubbed, Geoff. This is Jake at NRO.”

“Shit! How’re the Russians doing?”

“Still on countdown for a noon-our-time liftoff.”

“I knew the Chinese would fink out.”

“I think they tried hard, but there was a major fuel leak early this morning, and they couldn’t resolve it. One of my people speaks Mandarin and we had him patched into their comm channels.”

“So they’re completely out?”

“Yes. I’ll call you back, as things progress at Baikonaur.”