Orbit

Chapter 9

Arleigh Kerr stands at the end of the small table in the conference room of Mission Control, a freshly emptied bottle of water in his hand. His gaze is fixed on his boss as he clears his throat.

“Richard, I’m sorry to tell you, but we have no rescue capability. Venture is down for a month or more.”

"What?” DiFazio is almost out of his chair, his bushy eyebrows knitting together in a combination of pain and alarm. “A month? When did you find that out?”

Arleigh’s sigh is heartfelt, his eyes on the papers at the edge of the table. There are only the two of them in the room, better for such bad news. He carefully places the empty plastic water bottle next to the papers, as if adjusting a family treasure, his eyes focused on the base of the bottle until he can’t dally any longer.

“I just got the word from our maintenance chief. The right wing spar is cracked in addition to the gear problem. If we try to fly her, we could lose her going up or coming down. Complete wing loss.” His eyes rise to meet DiFazio’s.

“Can’t we rush the repair?”

“You’re the composites expert, Richard. Not me. They’re telling me with cure times, the best they could do is ten days. Something about rebonding that spar.”

“Oh my God! Without Venture, we can’t even… we couldn’t even keep to our schedule if this…”

“I guess the only good news is that we’ve only got the one passenger.”

DiFazio is shaking his head in pain. “So what options, if any, do we have?”

“We can’t mount a rescue mission, we can’t communicate…”

Richard’s voice cuts him short.

“No! Don’t tell me what we can’t do, goddammit! Tell me what we can do.”

Arleigh’s retort is just as quick. “How about pray?”

“Excuse me?”

“We don’t have a lot of options, Richard. Christ, I’m not sure if we have any options. If we had our other spacecraft, yes, we could launch and try a rescue. But we don’t. And you know NASA isn’t going to help. Some other country? The Russians? The Europeans? The Japanese? I don’t know. I haven’t called them. But it would cost more money than our entire capitalization to buy a Soyuz launch from the Russians, for instance, even if they could get one together in time.”

Richard is watching him, subdued now, but hair-trigger restrained as Arleigh continues. “And that raises another major, honking question.”

“Which is?”

“Is anyone even alive up there?”

Richard looks staggered. Arleigh concludes he hasn’t considered this. “We… we don’t know?”

“We don’t know anything, except that the ship is still on orbit and appears to be pressurized, according to NASA’s analysis… or was it NORAD’s? But zero communication, zero telemetry, no indication that Intrepid is doing anything more than automatically holding its pitch and roll position, and… and, we’re just guessing.”

Richard is shaking his head, eyes on the floor. He takes a deep breath before looking up. “Sorry, Arleigh. I just wasn’t ready for this, I guess.”

“Hell, neither am I! No one’s ever taken even a major nonfatal hit up there before. Why us? Why now?”

“You know this could kill us. I don’t mean to discount those two lives, but this could put us out of business.”

Arleigh sits heavily, swiveling the chair around to face the glass wall. His words are to the wall.

“Richard, you, of all people, know how risky this so-called business is. The forces involved, the explosive power, the number of life support things that can go wrong. I mean, we’re vastly more reliable than the shuttle could ever be, but… we’ve been hanging it out from the first.”

“I know, I know. It’s just…”

“We’ve all deluded ourselves into thinking we couldn’t actually lose one. We’ve had so many successful launches.”

“But we haven’t lost them yet. At least, we don’t know, right?”

“True, but a word of warning, okay? I mean, I’m only your flight director, but when this blows into the public eye, we’d better not be heard kvetching about the financial losses.”

“Of course not. I’ve got Diana inbound right now. We’ll put together a quick strategy.”

“It’s gonna leak, Richard.”

“I know it.”

“It’s gonna leak, and the media is going to smell blood and be all over it, and I don’t have a clue what to say or do… other than wait and watch and lean on NORAD and NASA for more information. We’re trying the radios constantly, but if we see the capsule turn around in position for retrofire, or if, at the end of the fourth orbit, it actually does retrofire, then we know for certain someone’s alive up there and following the checklists and we’ve got a chance.”

“Has someone called Campbell’s wife?”

“Yeah, I have. It was brutal. She’s tough, but she’s scared to death.”

“And… our passenger?”

“Dawson. Kip Dawson. We’re holding off for another hour or so before we call his wife.”

“For God’s sake, don’t wait too long. Don’t let her hear it from the media.”

“No. No, we won’t.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

“The end of Orbit Two. I figure… without any rational reason… I figure if Bill’s alive and functional, he’ll want to get the hell out of there as soon as possible, and when he passes through the window for second orbit return, that’s when I’d expect something to happen.”

“How much longer?”

“Twenty-three minutes from now. At least that’s the end of the window. Otherwise, he overshoots California, or worse.”

“But we still have two more orbits before it has to come down, right?”

“They could go longer. We figure they could keep breathing up there for, roughly three days, or a bit less.”

“Before the CO₂ scrubbers saturate?”

Arleigh is nodding. “That’s always the limit.” He gets to his feet, leaving Richard still seated. “I’d better get back in there. I’ve been whipping everybody into a thinking frenzy to see if we’ve missed anything.”

Richard nods, waving him away as he picks up the phone, then replaces it in its cradle, his eyes on the far wall as he thinks through the consequences of dialing the person he was ready to call.

Not yet. Not just yet.