At 5 Gs, I’m feeling the pain. No training or simulator has quite prepared me for this. It’s as if a big dog is sitting on me, my skinsuit compressing my abdomen and legs to minimize the forces. But there’s no smart fabric that would help my lungs expand, and it’s getting scary hard to breathe. Eight and a half minutes into my wild ride, the engine stops. The g-forces ease. And then my arms float up.
“Welcome to space, Captain Chase,” and it’s Dick’s voice in my earpiece. “There are a lot of relieved people down here on the ground.”
“I’m kind of relieved myself,” I begin unzipping my gloves as Dick lets me know that we’re on a secure radio feed.
Our conversation won’t be overheard by mission controllers or anyone, he says, not that I believe him. Off comes my helmet while he explains that in a little less than two hours, I should reach GEO and rendezvous with the satellite I’m there to protect.
Digging my CUFF out of a pocket in my spacesuit pants, I unzip the pants from the torso. Taking off everything, I begin stowing my disassembled BS in the netting.
“The rogue object we’re tracking is staying the course,” Dick informs me. “It’s fitting the description of some type of satellite as you know, but obviously that’s not what it is. Hopefully we’ll know more when you get there.”
“We can see it, but can it see us?” I can’t stop worrying about it the same way I’m unconvinced my SIN can’t be detected.
Now that my Chase Plane and its attached MOBE are no longer enclosed in a fairing, we should be picked up easily on radar or possibly by a space telescope. But hopefully we’re not. The vehicle’s conductive skin is in stealth mode, rather much like Ranger when he’s ghosting. We’re supposed to be totally blacked out, not just on radar but visually.
We’re to blend with our surroundings, and mostly that’s going to be the dark vacuum of space. But I can’t say for sure. While there’s much the cameras can pick up, they can’t show me what color I am. I have to infer it from one of many mind-withering codes, and right now our shade of black is RV3, which ART lets me know is raven.
Dick assures me there’s no reason to believe my vehicle is detectable by the normal means. And I don’t like his use of words as I look out the porthole window next to my seat, seeing nothing but complete blackness.
“What about the weather satellite everybody’s looking for?” I remind him as I put on my CUFF. “Imagine all those satellite watchers out there looking for it,” I add but they’re not who I’m worried about.
“We’ve solved that rather simply,” his voice in my earpiece. “It’s been leaked and making the rounds that a very expensive weather satellite didn’t deploy properly, and burned up in the atmosphere along with the fairing, the rocket stages.”
“That might do the trick,” I answer but I’m never reassured when it comes to Neva Rong, and I sure as heck don’t want her knowing what’s really going on.
I remind Dick with all due respect that when he tried the same manipulation after the rocket blew up, there weren’t any takers. No one who matters buys that NASA might have been looking for something important in the debris at Wallops Island or I wouldn’t be in outer space right now. His misinformation didn’t fool anyone.
“Do we have to worry about anyone monitoring my communications with the ground?” I ask. “Because no one’s supposed to be up here. So anybody listening to us would be onto our secret mission.”
“Nothing can be monitored,” Dick reiterates. “I suggest you acclimate yourself to the MOBE, and to floating around. No matter how much they tell you it’s like being neutrally buoyant underwater, it’s not,” and as I release my harness and various straps, I remember Stella saying the same thing, and both of them are right.
Floating in microgravity is nothing like scuba diving or anything else I’ve ever done, I’m finding out the hard way after shoving off a little too vigorously from my seat, knocking my head on the ceiling.
Terrified of kicking my avionics, the control stick or switches, I tuck myself into a ball. Slowly somersaulting out of the cockpit, I float along the ceiling like a PONG.
42
“OKAY, this is ridiculous!” I’m mortified, trying to straighten myself out, moving and knocking about in my skinsuit like a drunken eel.
“The key is to do everything much more slowly than you think you should,” Dick’s voice through speakers now. “The first time I was on Station, I was like a bull in a china shop. It’s a little bit like flying a helicopter . . .”
“It’s not anything like that!”
“What I was about to say, Calli, is very small corrections, feel it, don’t think it,” his voice all around me.
I begin to settle down. Or rather I’m up, still around the ceiling, and swimming with my hands won’t get me anywhere, only makes matters worse. Trying to hold my breath or blow it out to regulate my buoyancy doesn’t work when there’s no gravity or water.
“Use your finger,” Dick says, and for a moment I figure he’s referring to my WAND, my scarred right index finger.
But he’s suggesting I push off and stop with a finger, doesn’t matter which one. Any finger will do, and he goes on to give me a physics primer, and I relax more. I stop struggling and begin floating in place as Dick goes on about mass versus weight, and every force creates an equal and opposing one. The lighter the touch, the better, he lectures me like he always has as I begin to get the knack of it.
I float around a storage area of Nomex storage bags strapped in place, and the galley with its hot-water dispenser and drawers of space straws and drinks. Grabbing a silvery bag of lemon punch, I drink a toast to myself because someone should. I just blasted off in a rocket. I’m in outer space headed to GEO, and if I never did another thing, this might be enough.
Clamping the straw shut so the liquid doesn’t float out, I think about the last time I drank this stuff, when I was handcuffed and tethered. I don’t want to fool with reconstituting spaghetti or beef stew at the moment but wouldn’t mind a simple protein bar. In fact, I take two out of the netting inside a drawer.
Floating to the hatch that connects the PEQUOD to the MOBE, I turn a valve to equalize the pressure. Then I crank the handle, pushing in the metal access door, and I thread my way through the opening, careful not to scrape my back or whack my head again. The MOBE looks familiar because I saw its test model splash down at the Gantry, and I spot the hand- and footrails.