Kimberly steeled herself as she approached the hatch to Node 1, getting ready to kick off from its metal side and spring into Node 3 and surprise the terrorist.
With any luck, he’d still be sitting on the can and this would be a quick, but potentially messy, end for him.
Breathing hard, she entered the Node 1 hatch, powered up the 98 GHz source, and started to kick into the module.
Farid floated down into Node 1 as he exited headfirst from Node 3. His eyes bulged wide as he spotted Kimberly.
“Zhalep!”
Kimberly kicked out to change her momentum as Farid twisted in midair, reaching out to grab her. He caught her elbow and she twirled. She brought the millimeter wave source up and pressed as hard as she could on its activating switch while sweeping the beam toward Farid.
“Sheshen sigiyin!” he screamed. He started writhing in the air, bucking his torso back and forth as he desperately tried to get away from the hellish pain of the heat-inducing beam.
Turning in the air, Kimberly tried to keep the beam trained on him, but she hit the module wall and bounced away at an angle.
Momentarily free from the beam’s painful power, Farid yelled hoarsely as he whipped his arms and legs around. He tried to move through the air so that he could find a place to push off and reach her.
Kimberly swung around and held her thumb on the activating switch, coolly bringing up the device once again and bathing him in the invisible beam.
Farid screamed and started bucking back and forth in the air, trying to flee, but Kimberly kept the beam steadily on him. Her foot hit the side of the module but she immediately compensated, pushing herself toward Farid while keeping the invisible millimeter radiation waves on him.
The module rang with his cries, but Kimberly tuned them out. She brought up Shep’s knife in her other hand and, keeping the beam steady, bore in on Farid’s neck, intent on his jugular—
Something hard and painful struck her foot. She cried out and started spinning, taking the 98 GHz beam off Farid.
Yelling erupted behind her, and as she continued to spin around she saw that Bakhet held the titanium Russian prybar in both hands as he drove toward her.
Kimberly instantly saw that Bakhet wasn’t going to risk throwing the prybar at her, as he’d done earlier. Instead he charged at her, intending to take her out with a swing to the head. Kimberly brought up the millimeter-wave weapon.
She pressed the activator switch and Bakhet pulled up, a look of astonishment on his face. But it quickly passed; he hovered before her, looking puzzled.
He’d felt only a brief pulse of the heat beam, Kimberly realized. She pressed the switch again, as hard as she could. Nothing happened.
It’s out of power, she realized. Without thinking she threw the little cylindrical device at Bakhet. It hit the side of his face, making him yowl with pain as he let go of the titanium prybar.
Reacting to the throw, Kimberly spun in the air. Her foot hurt like hell from the hit she’d received a moment before. She kicked out with her other foot as Farid drove toward her, having regained his wits now that he was no longer being roasted.
Kimberly ducked beneath his outstretched arms and shot back into the U.S. lab. She flew down its axis to Node 2, turned the corner by kicking against the wall, and finally reached the JPM, with Farid and Bakhet roaring gutturally as they came after her.
She quickly dived into the JPM and closed the Node 2 hatch, then hastily duplicated the procedure she’d used to evacuate the air in the vestibule connecting the two modules.
Within seconds the air gushed out of the small compartment and vacuum filled the two-foot space. Once again tons of air pressure kept both hatches tightly sealed.
Kimberly turned away from the hatch, gasping for breath. She didn’t bother to peer at what the terrorists might be doing in Node 2. Her foot throbbed painfully and her hip was still sore from being sliced by the prybar yesterday.
Trying to ignore the pain, Kimberly focused her thoughts on what she might do to stop the terrorists from deorbiting the station. They’d shown that they were human and not infallible. Damned smart, she admitted ruefully. But not infallible.
Kimberly told herself that if she put her mind to it, she would discover something she could do to stop those two SOBs, with or without NASA’s help.
PAYLOAD OPERATIONS CENTER, MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
Every person but one in the air-conditioned operations center had their eyes riveted to the largest monitor in the big room, or was searching the Internet on his or her own console, watching as many news streams as they could, all trying to glean any new information that might help keep the ISS from deorbiting.
The big wall monitor was split into myriad windows, displaying feeds ranging from Fox News and CNN, to MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, Telemundo, and Al Jazeera, while the individuals scanned space blogs and tried to chase down rumors online: international news sites, social media and user forums, trying to dig up anything that might be used to keep the ISS alive.
On the newscasts, news pundits hosted a wide range of “experts” who speculated and pontificated about the Vasilev’s murder that had been broadcast over NASA TV before the feed had been cut. The video loops were replayed over and over, as psychiatrists analyzed the possible motives of the two killers. Rogue cosmonauts? Misguided extremists? Freedom fighters? Warped. Duped. Zealots. Terrorists.
Other experts analyzed the International Space Station’s orbit, which had not deviated at all from NASA’s published orbital predictions, released a few days before the killings. Still others speculated about NASA’s silence, the agency’s refusal to answer any and all queries about what had happened, how it could have happened, or if there had been additional deaths aboard the ISS. Was there even anyone left alive up there?
The news media—and the public who watched their TV broadcasts—widely believed that after killing all the astronauts and cosmonauts who had been aboard the station, the two terrorists had committed suicide, mirroring worldwide terrorist behavior from the past. Previous terrorists on the ground had often killed themselves—and others—with explosives they carried on their bodies. Could these terrorists have done the same thing, possibly by venting all the station’s air to space? And if they did, what was their motive? No one knew, and NASA wasn’t talking. Neither was the rest of the U.S. government, nor Russia, nor any of the other international partners.
No contact had been made with the station after the broadcast of the first two killings had been shut off. The Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos; the European Space Agency; the Japanese and Canadian space agencies all confirmed their own communications blackouts.
The rumor grew that NASA was heroically attempting to control the ISS from the ground, so that it could continue the so-called housekeeping functions and keep its orbit stable, and not allow it to decay because of atmospheric friction. Space experts noted that the station normally lost about a hundred meters of altitude per day, and had to periodically engage its thrusters to boost to a higher orbit, going back up as much as three kilometers in altitude every three weeks to prevent the ISS from deorbiting. That would explain NASA’s reluctance in releasing any additional information. But while NASA, the U.S. government, and other space agencies remained quiet, other more nefarious rumors rocketed through the media and over the Internet.