Orbit

Chapter 5

A sharp, almost metallic “plink” echoes through the interior of the spacecraft.

Kip doesn’t want to tear himself away from the reverie of what he’s seeing out his window, but the sound is too loud to ignore, and he feels a pressure fluctuation in the cabin.

He begins to turn his head back forward, realizing at the same moment that something wet has sprayed the back of his neck.

“Bill, what was that?”

Campbell is facing forward, but not answering. Kip can see the astronaut’s headset askew, his hands sort of floating up in front of him.

What on Earth?

“Bill?”

No answer.

"Bill!”

Is he pulling a joke? If so, this is not funny.

“Bill, come on, answer me!”

Kip leans toward him. There is a spot, almost like a hole, in the back of the pilot’s seat toward the top, and there’s a reddish mist floating around in the zero-g atmosphere of the cabin. He feels his stomach twisting up as he looks behind and spots a splatter of red on the aft bulkhead, along with what has to be another hole.

He begins clawing at his harness to release it so he can lean forward. Bill Campbell is still silent. Why?

The seat harness mechanism gives way and he launches himself forward too fast, floating over Campbell’s right shoulder, twisting like the zero-g amateur he is, his back coming to rest against the instrument panel with a soft thud, his eyes fixating on his companion’s blank expression.

Bill’s eyes are open wide and fully dilated, and in the middle of his forehead is a small, red-tinged hole.

“Oh, God!” Kip hears himself gasp as he claws for something to hold on to, aware he may be kicking dangerously sensitive controls. He grabs hold of something with his left hand and shakes Bill with his right, praying for a quick and cogent response.

But there is none. The astronaut looks gone, a lot of blood leaking from the exit wound in the back of his head. He’s beyond hope. What Kip felt on the back of his own neck is apparently Bill’s blood.

Kip feels himself recoil in pure panic, as if he’s preparing to run.

Oh my God! Oh God! What happened?

Somewhere inside he already knows the answer. Something—a tiny space rock, a discarded piece of space junk—something has smashed into and through Intrepid at an incredibly high speed and passed like a bullet through Bill’s cranium, killing him instantly. Keeping a small hit from exploding the craft or leaking out all the air was a major engineering challenge they were told about in training. That was the very reason the spacecraft was built with self-sealing walls.

But he never took the threat seriously. No one has ever been killed by a space rock before, especially not inside a warm capsule. Have they? What are the chances?

Kip floats himself back toward his seat shaking with confusion.

This simply can’t be happening!

He grabs the mouthpiece on his headset and begins calling for help in a higher-pitched voice than his own, before recalling that he has to press something to transmit outside the spacecraft. A switch, a button, something he was never supposed to need. Where the hell is it? He scrambles around the side of his armrest and finds it, stabbing at it and calling again.

“Mission Control, ah, Intrepid. Emergency! Mayday! Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! I have a big problem!”

A big problem? What a pitiful understatement, he thinks, as he waits for the response. A big problem would be an astronaut with an upset stomach.

“Mission Control… ASA Mojave… somebody… please come in. This is Intrepid. We have a big fucking problem up here!”

Nice touch, he thinks, adding a guilty feeling to his growing resume of horrors. My first communication from space and it’s the “F” word.

Between checking to make sure he’s really pushing the transmit button and boosting the volume control to hear the response that isn’t coming, a small lifetime passes—accompanied by the mental buzz of what has to be his sky-high blood pressure pounding through his brain.

He looks out the window, recognizing the Arabian desert moving by smartly beneath, realizing he’s as isolated now as if he was sitting without a radio or water in some trackless sand dune three hundred ten miles below. No, he isn’t working the radios wrong. The radios just aren’t working.

So now what?

The frantic calls stop and Kip forces himself away from his seat and backward to the far right-hand corner of the tiny compartment, as if a wider angle view will illuminate the big picture at last, showing him the passage back to the place he was before.

Which was newly on orbit. Happy as hell! Privileged.

The luckiest guy in the world! he recalls thinking, mocking his own words of minutes before. From a lifelong dream to the worst nightmare in record time. The irony is almost funny.

There’s a handhold near the corner of the compartment where he’s hovering and he grips it tightly now, his eyes on his deceased companion, his mind still slogging through the beginnings of a deep denial that’s already being challenged by something vaguely remembered from the previous two weeks in training. Something about emergencies. Something about going to the laminated checklist.

Yes! Get the checklist!

But which one? He can’t recall any checklist labeled IN CASE YOUR ASTRONAUT/PILOT IS KILLED BY A SPACE ROCK!

The checklists and detailed procedures, they’d been taught, are all contained in the master computer screen in front of the pilot. But there are physical versions—laminated duplicates—stored in a side compartment and Kip launches his body in that direction, coming in too fast again and thudding into the sidewall. He works the latch and yanks out the bound stack of pages, rifling through them far too rapidly, his thoughts near hysterical and his hands shaking too much to focus on what he’s looking for.

Calm down! he tells himself, the command having little effect. Somewhere in these pages is a solution. He can feel it. But where?

He finds procedures for dealing with loss of oxygen pressure, failures of this or that instrument, and flight-control-system problems, and he finally seizes on one dealing with radio failure, ripping the pages back and forth as he tries to focus and deal with the information a step at a time.

No, dammit! Not the right one!

More page turning. He’s aware that Saudi Arabia has slipped away and he’s approaching the Indian subcontinent, flying over the Persian Gulf. Geography has always been a love, but there’s no time now to do anything but take note. Whatever he has to do to get help…

For the first time since whatever object it was smashed through his world, Kip stops himself. His hands are still shaking, his heart racing, but his thoughts turn to a very obvious reality. There is no help! Even if he gets the radios working, physically no one can come up here and bring him home, because it’s been made very clear that none of the governmental space agencies will lift a finger for a private space adventure.

Even NASA will ignore him.

No, he decides, he knows what he’s got to look for now. If he can’t reestablish contact with the ground, then it’s up to him to do the same things Bill would do—throw the same switches he would throw—drop them out of orbit at the appointed time. And there has to be at least some time to figure it out. They haven’t even completed one orbit.

We’re supposed to come down after four orbits. A bit less than six hours from now.

He’s breathing rapidly and he wonders if he’ll deplete all the oxygen if he keeps it up.

But Bill isn’t breathing at all anymore, so he’s got double whatever they’d have had together. In any event there should be enough for six hours.

Also, he thinks, the electrical circuits are still on. The panel’s still functioning. Lights and a heater are keeping him warm.

He looks forward, searching for the point of entry and finds it at last, just below the command window frame and forward, one of the few places something could have come through without exploding the glass and plastic forward window. Whatever it was blew out through the back wall and into the equipment bay behind them, where it either stopped or left the spacecraft. And the automatic layer of sticky sealant has obviously worked. He can hear no hissing, no obvious loss of air pressure.

He worries for just a moment about any other unseen, undetected damage back there, back where the engine and fuel tanks are located. But if there was damage to the fuel, wouldn’t he be dead now? Wouldn’t there at least be flashing red alerts all over the elaborate liquid crystal displays?

They show nothing, and he finds the fuel status selection and does his best to read the fact that as predicted, half the fuel remains and is safe a few feet behind him.

Once again he starts pawing through the checklists, selecting the ones on communication failure and reading carefully down each category, checking circuit breakers when he can find them and changing settings, each time expecting to hear the comforting voice of the controller back in Mojave.

But the headset remains silent.

He’s ignoring the floating remnants of Bill’s spilled blood he hasn’t been able to mop up with a series of tissues—just as he’s forcing himself not to think about having to cover the astronaut’s leaking head with a thin silver, mylar blanket before pulling his body out of the command chair. What was Bill Campbell is now a macabre hooded form tied to the back wall of the small cabin while the capsule’s only living occupant sits in front of the panel searching desperately for a way to talk to the planet below.

And with Sri Lanka and the east coast of India sliding by beneath him, Kip finally exhales and sits back in the assaulted command chair, letting the checklists float listlessly in front of him as he struggles through the cobwebs of his panic and pulls the last curtain of denial aside.

Dear God, I am alone up here. And I’ve got five hours to learn how to get myself back.