Without taking her eyes off the frustrated terrorists, Kimberly replied, “The patch worked. Please forward my thanks to everyone who had a hand in helping.”
“Copy. We’ll be keeping the Ka open as a backup, and in the meantime you should have access to all your down and cross links. And the Kazakhstanis have been locked out of all system control. Once you bring up the video we’ll patch you in to the Administrator. Patricia Simone has some good news for you about the Dragon and its backup.”
“Rog,” Kimberly replied.
Now that the ISS wasn’t losing altitude she thought she should set about reestablishing contact with her other links. But she hesitated and instead resumed watching the two terrorists flailing about the Command Center.
She briefly thought about taunting the bastards, rubbing it in that she’d won, but she realized that such an action would infuriate them even more and make them redouble their efforts to circumvent what she’d done. They certainly had shown what they’re capable of doing; if she hadn’t had immense resources on the ground backing her up, the situation might well have been reversed, and it might well be them watching her fight for her life.
At least everything was in the clear for the moment. CAPCOM had confirmed that she now controlled the ISS systems and the terrorists had been locked out, unable to change the situation. She didn’t have to worry about the terrorists reengaging the thrusters.
But she also knew that within a few days the Dragon would arrive and she’d still have the problem of dealing with Farid and Bakhet face-to-face. And although she controlled the ISS systems now, she was alarmingly low on propellants.
So she’d still have to confront the murderers if she was going to use the robotic arm to pull in the Dragon and then assure that one of the Node 2 berthing ports was available and working.
And once again that meant intelligent preparation of the battlefield.
She knew that if Scott were getting ready for battle the first thing he’d do would be to ensure that he had the upper hand. That implied making certain that the terrorists were in no shape to fight. Which in turn meant wearing them down physically.
She had two days. The easiest way of wearing them down was to take away their air and let the SOBs suffocate. But if she tried to vent the air in the ISS there was nowhere near enough reserve to fill the station back up again. The ISS’s 33,000 cubic feet of pressurized volume would require several resupply flights just to replenish its air; it would overwhelm the Oxygen Generation System’s meager five to twenty pounds produced in a day. The total mass of all the air in the station weighed more than a ton.
Scratch that, Kimberly thought. It would be tough to gain the upper hand by doing something to the ISS that wouldn’t affect her.
Maybe she could do something that would affect them psychologically, mess with their minds.
She called up the master function for the station’s lighting systems. She clicked the boxes next to all the modules except the JPM, then set the control state to OFF. Glancing at the webcast, she saw the view from Central Post had plunged into darkness. Except for the faint glows coming from the laptops in the modules, she saw nothing but blurs crossing the screen as Farid and Bakhet stumbled in the shadows.
They were screaming so loud that she turned the volume down on the audio. She could make out garbled curses, but could barely understand what they were shouting:
… a Middle Eastern whore is stopping us!
… an affront and a dishonor to our culture!
Smiling, Kimberly switched off the monitor and tried to think of what else she could do. She had only two more days to prepare the battlefield before the Dragon arrived.
TWO DAYS LATER
DAY FIVE
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
Scott Robinson lay on his back in the acceleration couch of the CST-100 Starliner’s crew module atop NASA’s Space Launch System booster rocket, his booted feet elevated, waiting for the launch.
Unlike his three previous Soyuz flights from the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan, where he’d had to wear the Russian-designed Sokol-KV2 spacesuit, he felt quite comfortable in the so-called “Boeing Blue” spacesuit, manufactured exclusively for the Starliner with its touch-screen-sensitive gloves, flexible material, and soft helmet.
Over the continuing chatter from the launch team he could hear the muted sounds of the rocket coming alive: creaking and groaning as the liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellants were pumped into their tanks, the background hum of electrical connections, the pops and sighs of metal expanding and contracting throughout the incredibly sophisticated assembly.
The CST-100 was like a vast, voluminous cavern compared to what Scott had experienced in the cramped Soyuz launches. But to be fair, he told himself, Boeing’s Starliner was the new kid on the block; the Soyuz had direct lineage from the 1960s Cold War days, the brainchild of the Soviet Union’s renowned Korolev Design Bureau.
The Starliner carried no other supplies except enough hypergolic propellants to fill the reserve tankage of the ISS.
Scott had complete faith in both the Dragon launch and his own, despite there being less than nine thousand feet separation between the two rockets. He knew that Mini Mott fretted over the risk that a catastrophe with the Dragon on Pad 39A could very likely engulf the Starliner and make it explode, too. But life was a risk, Scott thought. So he was sitting at the top of a massive Roman candle, 322 feet above the ground, ready to be hurled skyward by 5.5 million pounds of thrust from two solid rocket boosters and four RS-25 liquid fuel engines. And even that was nothing compared to what Kimberly was going through.
He flicked his eyes over the control board’s readouts while half listening to the ongoing countdown for the Falcon 9 booster and its Dragon capsule on the next pad. Those guys have a much tighter launch schedule, and even if they make their ten-second window, they’ll still have nearly four hours of flight time before reaching the ISS and trying to carry out a rescue.
The last he’d heard, while he was suiting up and getting ready to head for the launch pad, was that Kimberly had agreed to stay in the JPM and not get involved in a face-to-face confrontation with the two terrorists.
Right.
He didn’t believe that for a nanosecond.
He just hoped that she hadn’t heard about the massive protests that had broken out when the public learned that the ISS had started coming down. The Heavens-above.com amateur satellite-tracking website had released the government’s latest Spacetrack database just before mysteriously going off-line. Their analysis showed clearly that the space station was descending. Now, without access to more current data, the public didn’t have any confirmation other than NASA’s assurance that the ISS’s orbital elements showed that the station was not descending.
Which hardly anybody believed. Traffic jams started to clog the arteries of New York, Los Angeles, and many cities in between. People were marching in the streets, demanding to know what the government was hiding. Vacations for local police throughout the country were canceled in anticipation of the growing protests, and eleven state governments had called up the National Guard as a precaution.
Scott knew that behind the government’s silence a fierce power struggle between different factions was raging. The military wanted to keep the ISS’s orbital data secret and out of the public’s knowledge, since it would probably be used as targeting information for the Aegis antisatellite weapons. NASA wanted complete transparency, to quell the public’s fears. But the National Security Council and the President had the upper hand and refused to allow the release of more data, because if the ISS started descending again, knowledge of the station’s rate of fall would generate only more panic.