There. She started to close the arm when something else hurtled into the module. Bakhet. His eyes wild, he held the titanium prybar and headed straight for her.
Crap! She turned from the screen, pulling Shep’s knife out of her pocket as she ducked and kicked away, flying through the air.
Bakhet threw the prybar at her. It flew past her and hit the robotic arm’s control screen, which shattered, spewing pieces of debris around her as she moved from the carnage.
Farid kept yowling with pain, still tumbling weightlessly in the module until he smacked into the opposite side. Bakhet tried to stop his own momentum, but without any footing he smashed against the forward wall of the U.S. lab and bounced away from her.
Kimberly ducked away from them and, kicking out, shot toward the hatch back into Node 2 and the sanctuary of the JPM. She flew just under Bakhet, who reached out to grab her by the arm, yelling wildly. As she passed she swiveled and lashed out with Shep’s knife, slashing his arm.
He howled as globules of red spurted from his arm like a fire hose of blood spewing through the module. The two of them bounced against the insulation and the metal frame of the hatch as thousands of tiny spinning spheres of blood mixed with the Rooster sauce in a cloud of liquid asteroids.
Kimberly pulled loose of Bakhet’s grip and flew into Node 2, leaving the yelling cacophony behind her. Reaching the module’s far side, she used the inner handrail to change her direction and sailed into the darkened JPM. Once inside she turned, closed the hatch covers, and evacuated the air in the vestibule between the two modules, once again sealing both hatches with vacuum.
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Only when the JPM’s air pressure tightly sealed the hatch with tons of force did Kimberly slow down to take a deep breath. She felt her heart rate start to slow, but the blood still pounded in her ears from the exertion.
Once again she’d escaped from harm by barricading herself in the module. But this time, instead of peering out the hatch into Node 2 and sneering at the terrorists she turned her focus to the large JPM windows at the far end of the module and craned her neck, trying to catch a view of the waiting Dragon.
She spotted the snub-nosed capsule, still floating just a few yards from the Node 2 berthing port. She felt a depressing pang of disappointment. The Dragon was so close, but also incredibly far away. The robotic arm was positioned just centimeters above the vessel, frozen in place, not moving.
If she’d had only another half minute, she thought. Only a few seconds. She could have brought the Dragon in and positioned it right at the Common Berthing Mechanism, allowing it access to the station. And if that had happened, she wouldn’t be staring at the rescue vessel from the darkened JPM: her fellow astronauts would have overpowered Farid and Bakhet, ending this insane nightmare. They’d have wrestled control of the ISS away from the terrorists, and perhaps even could have transferred some fuel through an EVA fuel-line connect from their capsule to the station’s tanks, so they could have re-boosted the ISS to a higher, safer altitude.
As she watched through the small window, the Dragon slowly backed away from Node 2, leaving the station and the dangling robotic arm. It crept away slowly, only centimeters per second. But it was leaving the ISS, Kimberly knew.
She felt like a shipwrecked sailor, marooned on a desert island. With cannibals stalking after her.
Minutes dragged by as the Dragon pulled away, moving at a slight angle instead of heading straight back. Using the capsule’s small thrusters, the vessel started to circle slowly around the ISS, swinging in an arc that brought it around until it was directly in front of the JPM experimental hatch.
At first Kimberly thought the guys might somehow be planning to use the cramped airlock. But the 1.5-meter-diameter, two-meter-long chamber was big enough for only small experiments to be ejected from the pressurized volume of the JPM into the harsh environment of orbital space. Besides, the guys didn’t have any spacesuits with them.
Briefly she thought that they might try to rapidly decompress the air in their Dragon capsule and attempt to reach the JPM’s experimental airlock where she might be able to pull them in, one by one. But the airlock could only be opened from the inside control panel, and without wearing spacesuits they wouldn’t have a chance.
It was an insane idea. It would never work. How long could a human body survive in vacuum at more than 400 degrees below zero? Twenty or thirty seconds at most, before their eyeballs burst, their eardrums ruptured, their lungs exploded.
But these weren’t normal people in that Dragon trying to rescue her. They were astronauts, Navy SEALS, and Army Rangers in top-notch condition, supremely competent and incredibly confident—if not a touch crazy.
But no one could survive the passage from the Dragon to the small JPM hatch without a suit, even these guys, good as they were. That was the stuff of bad sci-fi movies, not the real world. She just hoped they weren’t so overconfident that they would try it anyway, and depend on her to pull them in.
She glanced at the second-generation spacesuit stored next to the hatch. It could barely fit in the airlock itself, and it wouldn’t be of any help to the guys anyway. There was no way to get it to them, and they’d have to open their own hatch to reach it. And even if they could access it, the suit needed a long, insulated hose to provide its air supply.
Kimberly felt a sense of relief as the Dragon glided past the JPM airlock and continued in a long arc around the station. It started to move out of her sight as it headed toward the station’s nadir, or Earth-facing side. It finally hit her that they may be trying to conduct a 360-degree inspection of the ISS. Or maybe they were approaching Node 2 from the nadir in an attempt to berth at the module’s nadir port.
But why would they do that? she wondered. She couldn’t access the robot arm, and since their ship was a resupply version of the Dragon it didn’t have the ability to approach any closer. So what are they trying to do?
She watched the capsule slowly move around the station until it passed beyond her sight. Now she couldn’t see the Dragon from the hatch or from any of the outside feeds. Kimberly could do nothing but wait, wondering what would happen next.
She decided that she had to go out of the JPM again, and this time make it a do-or-die effort.
It was obvious that the Dragon would never be able to berth without her help. And since the terrorists had destroyed the robotic arm’s controls in the U.S. lab, that left her only hope to dock the Dragon up to the arm’s primary controls in the Cupola. Could she get there? She had to somehow find something else in the JPM to overpower the terrorists and regain control of the robotic arm.
But how? What could she use?
Feeling more than a little desperate, she turned to rummage once again through the MO bags. In the darkened module she pulled aside the bungee-cord netting and groped through bag after bag, fumbling through the objects in them, squinting in the dim light filtering in through the hatch. I’ll have to jury-rig something, she thought, something deadly that will stop them cold, not just a half-assed contraption like the Rooster sauce. Digging through bag after bag, she felt her frustration mount.
The sun peeped over the curving horizon as Kimberly turned from the bungee-cord jail to the small experimental hatch. She spotted the Dragon, sunlight glinting off its curving flank. It was moving away from the station. They’ve probably hit bingo fuel, she realized. It grew smaller against the backdrop of the now-glowing Earth.