“Yes, sir. Anything else, Admiral?”
“Yeah.” Harrison handed the sheet back. “Pray for a miracle to happen, Chief.”
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
“Kimberly!” Scott yelped, alarmed. “What’s going on?”
Kimberly ran her fingers over the laptop’s keyboard. “Something tells me we don’t have three days for the Dragon to get here. At the rate those yahoos are pushing the thrusters, the ISS is decelerating a lot faster than they threatened. Can you get CAPCOM to come up with an estimate of how long I have?”
The voice link bleeped, and suddenly it sounded as if the transmission was coming from a large room filled with people.
“Kimberly, CAPCOM.” Tarantino’s reedy voice. “We broke your link with Basher and now you’re broadcasting over the MCC. Do you read?”
“Rog.”
“ADCO reports you’re dropping in altitude, and TOPO estimates station at entry interface in less than seventy-two hours. Our liaison with JSPOC and 14th Air Force at Space Command confirms the orbital elements. Can you engage your fore thrusters to raise your altitude?”
Kimberly stared intently at the laptop’s display screen, her mind racing. At entry interface, she echoed: NASA gobbledygook for fully hitting the atmosphere, moments before impact.
She mentally raced through a dozen options, trying to find a way to stop the flow of hypergolic propellants and cut the aft thrusters, or at least rotate the ISS back 180 degrees so that the thrusters would then reverse the deorbit. But nothing worked; she was locked out and couldn’t access any of the controls.
Her jaw tightening, she replied, “Negative, CAPCOM. I need to regain control. I think they’ve locked me out of the system at the 1533 level. Scott said he’d have the Flight Director expedite a fix. How long will it take to get a software patch?”
“Stand by one.” The link to the mission control center fell silent for a moment. Then, “We’re working on it. You’ll have the patch within thirty-six hours—”
“Wrong answer!” Kimberly interrupted. “You’ve got to do better than that. Thirty-six hours will put the ISS too deep down in the atmosphere to recover. I’ll be pushing up against the entry interface. We wouldn’t have enough fuel on board to boost back up, even if we tapped the FGB reserve and the fuel on both Soyuzes.”
“That’s the best estimate I’m getting,” Tarantino said. “MCC’s thrown everybody on it. It’s our top priority—thirty-six hours.”
“What about those Pros from Dover that Scott was touting? They’re supposed to be software wizards!”
The link went quiet for a moment. “The pros from … where?”
“Dover. It’s an old expression for expert, outside consultants. NSA—the spooks!”
“Oh, right. Stand by one.” Silence. Then CAPCOM came back curtly. “Revised estimate is less than twelve hours. The patch will be transmitted over the Ka data link. We’ll alert you before it’s broadcasted, and will be continuously looped so we can be sure there’s been a valid transmission. Recommend you go ahead and set up an interface to accept the patch so you’ll be able to directly insert it into the 1553 system. You’ll need some kind of large storage capacity as it’s going to be a big one. Copy?”
“Copy,” said Kimberly. She left the laptop and pushed off for the crystal growth experiment table, intending to cannibalize its data acquisition system and connect it to the JPM data uplink so she could store the software patch when it came up from the ground. She felt grateful that the Air Force Academy experiment used solid-state storage instead of the older and cheaper rotating hard discs. The time difference in buffering alone would expedite the insertion of the software.
Now that the ISS was decreasing in altitude her old worry about where the software patch might originate from evaporated into thin air. Getting the fix and regaining control of the ISS was now top priority. She just hoped that whoever jury-rigged the patch would at least test it on the virtual software platform NASA used to simulate the ISS’s operating system. She didn’t want to have any bugs in the patch show up that would make matters worse. She didn’t think she’d get a second chance to try it again.
She knew there was still an open mike to the MCC, and she’d never say it out loud, but if the station really did deorbit and she wasn’t shot down, Kimberly knew she’d burn up from the heat during reentry. Either option was a hell of a way to go, literally.
The next seventy-two hours might be her last.
Instead of moping about it and wringing her hands, though, the thought made her even more determined to stop the SOBs who were threatening the lives of thousands, if not millions of people.
Including her own.
FLASHBACK: KIMBERLY AND SCOTT
With nothing to do except wait for the software patch from the ground to reach her, Kimberly gave in to the need for sleep that was overwhelming her. Her entire body ached, the wound on her hip throbbed sullenly, and her eyes felt heavier with each passing moment.
Get a few minutes of sleep, she told herself. You don’t want to screw up everything by making a mistake because you’re sleep-deprived.
She didn’t feel altogether secure in the JPM. The hatch that led to the vestibule was firmly held in place by tons of air pressure, she knew, but still the thought of the two murderous terrorists on the loose in the ISS made her jittery.
Reluctantly, she wriggled against the bags of supplies and equipment held against the module’s wall by the webbing of bungee cords. But it wasn’t the terrorists that she thought of. It was Scott, and the last night of their marriage.…
Kimberly remembered lying on her side of the bed, warm and sticky after their bout of lovemaking. Despite his massive ego and macho attitudes, Scott was a passionate, attentive lover.
He had turned over on his side of the bed and murmured drowsily, “G’night, Kim.”
“Kimberly,” she’d said. Was he doing this on purpose? He didn’t respect her as a scientist and certainly not as a fellow astronaut. And just because it was announced she’d be the new ISS commander—a position he’d recently filled—didn’t give him the right to take it out on her.
“Huh?”
“My name is Kimberly. I don’t like being called Kim. You know that.”
Turning back toward her, he said, “Kim, Kimberly, Kablooey. What’s the difference?”
She propped herself up on an elbow. “I want to be called by my correct name. Kimberly.”
She heard him puff out a weary sigh. “G’night. Kim.”
“Kimberly!”
“Aw, don’t make such a big deal about it.”
Anger rising inside her, she asked, “How would you like being called Scotty?”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“Beam me up, Scotty. Captain Kirk’s looking for you.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“No, you are. I want to be called by my proper name. Is that too much to ask?”
“I like Kim. It’s cuter.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want to be reduced to a Kewpie doll.”