She banged a fist against the laptop’s support. Even with that open comm link to Earth, she’d been unable to reach NASA. So, in all probability, no one Earthside had any idea that she was still alive.
What else could she do? She wasn’t about to give up. The fight with these guys had just started. But once they began to deorbit the station, the clock would begin ticking for an uncontrolled reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.
Kimberly knew that once the station’s thrusters were fired it would be only a matter of a few days to slow the ISS enough so that it would dip into the upper atmosphere. And once atmospheric drag began slowing the station, it would become harder and harder to boost it back up.
So her goal was simple enough: make sure they didn’t deorbit.
One way to do that was to stop them from accessing the thrusters’ fuel. Without fuel, the thrusters can’t work.
They might eventually circumvent her efforts, and carry out their insane plan to bring down the station, but at least this way she could buy some time, get some breathing space to think about how she could really defeat them.
She turned back to the laptop. Racing through the graphical interface, she used the ISS’s Portable Computer System to gain administrative control of the station’s external functions.
She didn’t have to deal with any fuel pumps because the ISS used pressure-fed hypergolic propellants: the fuel would instantly ignite when it came in contact with the oxidizer. Helium was used to pressurize the fuel and oxidizer tanks, so she had only to shut down the helium valves. Since that critical command required sending two control messages, Kimberly first removed the command that inhibited shutting the valve, then changed the valve state from ON to OFF.
There. That prevented the bastards from using the thrusters to deorbit, and also kept them from commanding emergency overrides that would bring them back up. Since it’s been three years since Farid’s been on the station, she figured, it might take him a while to figure out what had happened.
That gave Kimberly a little time.
Now for the longer, strategic plan.
She forced herself to slow her breathing and started coolly assessing her situation. She had to go about this logically, divorce her emotions from her actions, especially since at first she’d been frightened and thought only about her short-term survival.
But now she was really ticked off. Part of her wanted to get even, just as her father had told her all those years ago. No way I’m going to allow these terrorists to deorbit the ISS, certainly not without putting up a fight!
But she knew that she couldn’t cloud her planning with anger. Not if she wanted to succeed. From somewhere she remembered an old adage: Revenge is a dish best served cold.
She started to set out her priorities, using the laptop to write them down so she could always go back and never forget what she’d committed herself to do, no matter how bleak things looked. She typed:
1. Stay alive, remain out of the hands of the terrorists, and communicate with NASA.
2. Prevent the terrorists from destroying the ISS.
3. Either render the terrorists helpless … or kill them.
So—first things first. She’d already accomplished two-thirds of priority one, but she still needed to get in touch with NASA and let them know she was still alive.
As an experimental physicist, she’d always had to jury-rig equipment to make it work right, no matter who the vendor was or how much they claimed it was “off the shelf” and ready to plug and play. High-tech equipment used for cutting-edge research never worked right out of the box, and Kimberly had quickly become adept at finding creative solutions to problems and making things work, even if they weren’t really designed to work that way. Her secret was that once she decided what she needed the gadget to do, she worked backward and figured out a way to make it work the way she needed.
Okay, she thought. I’ve cut the terrorists off from access to the propellants they need to deorbit that station. Good. Now she had to figure out what she had to work with in order to survive, to communicate, and to stop the ISS from deorbiting. As well as neutralize Farid and his partner.
At present she had administrative control of the ISS, so she had plenty of air and power; but that may change, she knew, especially if they find some way to override her control as administrator. They might discover a way to get around her lockouts and cut her power and air. But for now, she’d have to trust that what she’d done would hold—at least temporarily. Time to move on to the next priority and find a way to communicate with the ground.
Mentally she raced through several options. She considered exploiting everything from the comm links transmitting data from her experiments in the JPM to directly accessing one of the numerous relay satellites that NASA had placed in orbit.
But while she considered the pros and cons of each alternative, in the back of her mind loomed the bigger problem: keeping the ISS from deorbiting.
She pushed that problem from her thoughts and focused on communicating with Earth. Nothing fancy, complex, or sophisticated: just a straightforward, simple way to talk …
And then it hit her. It seemed so simple that she didn’t know why it hadn’t been the first thing she considered.
Of course.
ARISS: Amateur Radio on the International Space Station. The ham radios had originally been brought to the station years ago to conduct a simple experiment to determine if it was possible to communicate with Earth via such low power devices. Kimberly knew that the program had succeeded and blossomed: ham operators chatted with the ISS continually. The station’s last crew had even moved one of the three low-power radios to the JPM from the SM module.
She pushed to the opposite side of the compartment and started digging through a pile of equipment that had recently been moved to the Japanese module. There! She pulled out the Kenwood TM-D700 radio. Looking it over, Kimberly saw that it had two bandwidths of operation, 144–146 MHz and 435–438 MHz. She knew she’d normally be restricted to 25 watts of power, but she’d try to crank it up so she could contact more operators.
Several of the astronauts had used the old equipment, and although she hadn’t used it much herself, Kimberly knew the basic principles of how to operate the amateur radio. Once she had it powered up she’d be ready to go. There was an external ham antenna accessible from the Columbus module and the SM, and hopefully when they’d moved the radio they’d added a patch to it from the JPM.
Five minutes later Kimberly started broadcasting, using NA1SS as her call sign. It was the call sign for the space station and every ham radio operator knew it; they would immediately recognize its origin.
For the first time since the Soyuz had docked with the station, Kimberly felt as though she might really find a way out of this nightmare.
* * *
“Is this frequency in use? This is NA1SS. I say again, is this frequency in use?” Kimberly waited for ten seconds, and when no one replied, she said, “CQ, CQ, calling CQ. This is NA1SS: November-Alpha-One-Sierra-Sierra. Do you read?”
No one answered. She closed her eyes and ran through everything that could have gone wrong. Why wasn’t it working? The antenna patch was up, she had the right frequency, and she was using the correct call sign. There should have been twenty or more callers lining up to have a chance to speak to someone on board the ISS. Why wasn’t anyone answering?