She smacked the laptop’s restraint in frustration, and as her legs swung back she pushed toward the small experimental airlock. The terrorists had cut the power to the module, and now, with the laptop’s battery dead, she had no way to access the station’s controls and try to countermand the ISS’s rotation.
Within minutes the station would be in position for them to reengage the main thrusters, and with the forward part of the ISS now facing aft, they’d be able to slow the station’s speed and cause it to drop to a lower altitude. Facing increasing atmospheric drag, the station would start rapidly deorbiting—until it impacted on Earth.
Desperately, she tried to think of what she could do. She might be able to slow them up if she once again left the JPM and confronted them. But without the guys in the Dragon to back her up, or even divert the terrorists’ attention, there was a good probability that she’d lose the fight. Then she’d be dead and the station would crash, spewing radioactivity in the atmosphere while the debris might kill countless numbers of innocent people. She wasn’t even sure that the U.S. antisatellite weapons were in position to take the station down.
What could she possibly do?
Her pulse rate steadily rising, Kimberly tried to keep her cool by running through emergency checklists in her head, going over each procedure: what to do in case of a power outage, a loss of communications, hoping that somewhere, somehow she’d stumble across something that she hadn’t thought of before.
How could she stop the thrusters? She didn’t have physical or electronic access to the ISS state controls, so what else could she try?
With the laptop out of the picture, she couldn’t stop the flow of the fuel and oxidizer tanks. Was there another way to shut down those valves? They weren’t even accessible from the JPM, and the hypergolic propellant tanks themselves weren’t accessible from anywhere inside the station, much less the JPM.
She stopped, her eyes wide. But the propellant line was accessible outside the station, under a panel on the surface of the FGB, about halfway between the JPM and the far Russian SM module.
Her heart started to race again.
All she had to do, she told herself, to stop the flow of propellants was to crimp the fuel line: a narrow metal tube only a few millimeters in diameter. She could get to it by going outside the station, performing an Extra-Vehicular Activity.
Meaning she’d need access to one of the EVA suits—a nearly impossible task, since she’d have to get to the bulky suit by leaving the JPM again, travel to the Joint Airlock, suit up, and then exit the space station, all without drawing attention to herself.
And, oh yes, she’d have to spend an hour pre-breathing the low-nitrogen, enriched-oxygen air the suits used if she wanted to avoid getting the bends.
She couldn’t move the robotic arm without them discovering her presence, so how could she ever get all the way to the Joint Airlock and suit up without being detected?
Bleakly, she turned and looked at the JPM airlock, thinking that only moments before she had seriously thought the guys in the Dragon capsule might risk exposing themselves to the frigid vacuum of space in order to shoot across the distance from their vessel to the JPM’s undersized airlock.
What else can I use to survive outside the station, long enough to stop the flow of propellant to the thrusters?
And there it was, staring her in the face: the second-generation suit dangling in a bundle of bungee cords next to the airlock.
For once Kimberly was happy about her petite stature. She could squirm into the suit and squeeze through the experimental airlock, even in the suit. She was sure of it.
But the compact spacesuit didn’t have its own oxygen supply. It relied on a long insulated hose, an umbilical cord that provided life-giving air. By using it an astronaut could work outside the station indefinitely.
Her heart sank as she realized that the umbilical cord wasn’t nearly long enough to reach the fuel line’s access panel. This new experimental suit was meant to be used only near a hatch, not to traverse across the entire length of the station.
Okay, she thought. That’s just another problem, another bump in the road compared to everything else she’d encountered. And it wouldn’t be the last, she knew. Like, she’d also have to modify the small airlock to be operated from inside the module, rather than outside, as it was designed. To Kimberly these were merely engineering roadblocks, not physical impossibilities like trying to exceed the speed of light.
Okay, how can I do this? She raced through the logic. She could ditch using the umbilical cord and instead jury-rig the suit with one of the emergency oxygen bottles. She could fill the suit with oxygen before she exited the JPM through the experimental airlock, and then quickly attach another oxygen bottle. That way she’d have fifteen or twenty minutes of oxygen—more than that, really, as that length of time was calculated for much larger male astronauts.
Plenty of time to crimp the line, no problem. But she’d be going from air at a normal 14.7 psi to pure oxygen at a much lower pressure. She didn’t have time to pre-breathe; she just hoped that she wouldn’t get the bends. She felt an urge to cross her fingers.
She quickly began to take down the suit from its mooring by untying the bungee cords holding it to the insulated wall. As she unfolded the suit she found that it was bigger than she’d thought. She’d have to really squeeze through the small airlock. And since she’d have to get to the opposite side of the station with so little air, after she’d stopped the flow of fuel by crimping the line, she’d have to reenter the ISS using the Russian ПρК, or Peh-err-ka transfer chamber, at the far aft SM module.
And she’d have only twenty minutes of oxygen in the suit, tops, to accomplish all that she had to do. Plus, if she didn’t pre-breathe, then with all the exertion she’d have to go through, she was sure to get the bends, making things even worse. She recalled an in-suit exercise that dropped the oxygen pre-breathing time from three hours to as low as fifteen minutes in order to purge the nitrogen from her bloodstream, but she didn’t have even that much leeway.
Yet there was no other way. She had to stop the station from deorbiting.
Kimberly quickly shucked off her outer clothes and, stabilizing the suit on a fitting bar, she started pulling on the second-generation spacesuit.
As she worked her arms into the suit’s torso, out the small airlock viewport she saw stars streaming across her field of view. The station was still rotating into position to engage the main thrusters and begin its plunge to Earth.
She didn’t have much time.
INTERSECTION OF NASA CAUSEWAY AND HIGHWAY 1, CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
A growing crowd of people milled outside the barricades set up on the road, several miles from the main entrance to Kennedy Space Center. Barricades blocked the highways, with signs proclaiming road closures and that the Visitor Complex was temporarily shut down. A half dozen people carried hand-lettered protest signs demanding information about the rumors that NASA was conducting a secret military rescue mission. Family groups, couples, and elderly visitors strained to see past the barricades, tourists upset by the center’s closure, ruining their vacations.
TV news vans from local stations and national networks were parked by the side of the road, their satellite dishes pointing at an angle toward the southern sky. A young female reporter, stylishly blonde and wearing a formfitting red jacket, stood next to a middle-aged man as she began a live interview.