Her one consolation was that she’d never know if she’d failed. Her own death, Scott’s, and the station’s would be nearly instantaneous.
MCC’s voice came over the comm link. “STRATCOM reports two ASATs at station forward. Estimated time to impact … twenty-two seconds.”
“I’m scanning in that direction,” Scott said over the internal comm.
Kimberly concentrated on trying to integrate all the information rushing toward her: the uplinked visuals, the SBIRS feed, Scott’s monotonic voice, the digital readouts, the Soyuz and Starliner tracks, a dozen other parameters. It was as if she were totally immersed in the world’s most complex video game, one with thousands of lives and billions of dollars at risk.
Suddenly the comm went out, the graphical trajectories blinked off, and the screen went blank.
“I’m blind!” Kimberly screamed. She turned to another laptop and ran through the graphical interface.
“What happened?” Scott’s voice came from the Cupola. “Can I help?”
“No. I’m flying blind. The Ka-band’s down.”
“Must be handover from TDRSS East to West,” Scott said. Tracking and Data Relay Satellites relayed the station’s communications to NASA ground stations. When comm handoff changed from TDRSS East to TDRSS West a blackout of up to thirty seconds was normal.
Kimberly felt sweat beading her brow and her stomach was clenching sourly. She counted to herself, assuming the missiles’ velocity would change only minutely as she estimated the time she had left.
“Ready … ready…” she muttered. She punched at the graphical interface and immediately felt the low vibration of the thrusters as she engaged the hypergolic fuel controls. She hesitated, then rapidly stopped, then restarted the controls in a random sequence.
The comm blinked on again, displaying the ASAT trajectories. TDRSS handoff was complete. The two approaching missiles appeared to make a course adjustment, but Kimberly couldn’t tell if it had really happened or if it was her imagination. And the latency of the data being transmitted from the ground made it all the worse.
Are they moving away from us or toward us? she screamed silently at herself.
The station’s system was not built for fire-control or assessment. The purely emergency nature of the PDAM maneuver was considered a last-ditch procedure for the astronauts to haul the massive ISS out of the way of incoming space debris, like pushing a stalled race car off the track at Indy. NASA’s “Plan B” in case the PDAM maneuver didn’t work was for the astronauts to quickly scramble into a crew rescue vehicle and flee from the station, getting as far away from the incoming space junk as possible.
But with the two Soyuz and the Starliner capsules now serving as high-tech chaff, hopefully masking the ISS, there was absolutely no way for them to find refuge in case of a mistake.
“Tallyho!” Scott yelled. “Incoming! Incoming! I have visual at station forward!”
The laptop screen showed both missiles hurtling right at them.
“And now!” Kimberly jabbed again at the controls, just as the approaching icons converged on her position. Time seemed to hang suspended as the station lurched upward at a little more than five meters per second.
An open window on the adjacent laptop showed a splash of light. An instant later her ears popped from a sudden decrease in pressure; the deathly sound of something ripping its way through the station’s framework reverberated through the ISS. One of the warheads hit the station; the other must have slammed into one of the decoy Soyuzes flying behind and above them.
Kimberly stared at the controls as an alarm clanged. “It’s DC-1!” she shouted.
She kicked off for the adjacent module, hit the access hatch, and grabbed the inside of the vestibule to swing herself around and face the airtight entry door. She pulled down the cover and hurried through the steps to seal the DC-1 module. Was there any other leak? Something that might have hit the station, but would only work itself loose and cause them to lose their air?
Seconds ticked by. Scott floated in, his expression questioning, and hovered beside her. Kimberly ran through the sequence of safety checks, gradually convincing herself that the breech in DC-1 had been the only serious damage the ISS had sustained.
There was no sign of another impact, no indication of air escaping anywhere, no power failure or anything else that might indicate a dangerous collision had occurred. Only the DC-1 was void of air.
She tried to smile at Scott. “We made it.”
He nodded shakily.
Kimberly felt her chest raise and lower as she pulled in breaths. The sound of blood pounding in her ears overwhelmed anything that Scott or MCC might have been saying.
The nightmare was over. She, Scott, the ISS, and America’s space program were very much alive.
CENTRAL POST, INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
As much as Kimberly had been through during the last week, she had a feeling that in some ways the hardest part might be just around the corner.
After they spoke with the thoroughly grateful and praising President, the comm switched to the NASA Administrator’s private office. Models of rocket launchers, memorable space capsules, the Space Shuttle, and the ISS bedecked the bookshelves behind the Administrator’s desk and dangled from the ceiling. Patricia Simone sat on the sofa off to one side of her desk; the only other person in the office was her Chief of Staff, Mini Mott, sitting quietly at her side.
Simone smiled tiredly into the camera, and Kimberly noticed tiny crow’s-feet in the corners of the ex-astronaut’s eyes.
“I don’t know where to start,” Simone said, her voice husky with emotion. “What you’ve done for the nation, the space program … I … I can’t begin to say how wonderful it is to see both of you, alive and safe.”
Floating beside Kimberly, Scott glanced at her before answering. He cleared his throat. “I think it’s fair to say that it’s all due to Kimberly, ma’am. Anyone in the astronaut corps could’ve ridden the Starliner up here. Saving the station was all her doing. She’s an incredible lady.”
Kimberly thought, Now that’s a first. “It was mostly luck,” she said simply.
“Luck didn’t have anything to do with it,” Scott insisted. “It was anticipating and being proactive. Not reacting or waiting. What astronauts are trained to do.”
Kimberly felt puzzled. What had gotten into him? First him showing respect, and now this? Usually Scott was the first to try to grab the glory.
Mini coughed. He looked uncharacteristically embarrassed. “If we’re through with the accolades, I don’t want to overwhelm you kids with too much trivia, but this is an opportune time to boost the popularity of the nation’s space program, call in some well-deserved chits.”
Uh-oh! Alarms went off in Kimberly’s head. “Meaning?” she asked, pulling closer to the laptop.
“Meaning that, believe it or not, you two are the most popular people on the planet,” Mott replied. “Especially you, Kimberly. More admired than Hollywood types and even royalty. As such, I’ve put together a proposed schedule of events for interviews, ghostwritten articles, backgrounds for your biographies, and daily live updates from the station while you’re waiting—”