Orbital Maneuvers (5 page)

“Roger that.  I am going to trip the trigger.”

Susan’s heart was beating faster and louder. She couldn’t hear the pumps and motors in her suit any longer.  Her breathing was coming in short gasps.  She knew it was coming…it was almost here…she could feel it… she couldn’t swim away…it was too late!

“Ivannnnnn…!” Susan heard herself scream as she pulled herself further into the corner of the payload bay, trying to crouch down to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible.  Her mind was racing and the next half second unwrapped itself in hideous slow motion.  Susan watched in terror as high above the payload bay the leading edge of the monster—jagged, black, tortured and cratered—made its appearance.  Racing silently by, it kept coming.  It grew darker in the payload bay as the asteroid passed between the shuttle and Earth, blotting out the light reflected from the planet.  The asteroid was slowly rotating, as it had for eons.  This rotation, combined with the jagged shape of the asteroid, gave the illusion that the monster was beginning to reach out toward the shuttle, stretching out a fin or arm, to catch whatever was there.  Susan crouched lower in the cargo bay, straining the joints in her suit until they groaned under the stress. The appendage grew closer and closer until the very tip of it grazed the top of the shuttle sending a deadly cloud of shattered tiles toward the back of the payload bay.  The spray of ceramic shrapnel shredded the insulation on the back and sidewall of the bay and the jacket on the shuttle arm. The shower of debris in turn shattered tiles that covered the shuttle’s engine pods and rudder.  Several larger pieces of debris punched holes through the rudder.

Susan flinched as a piece of tile grazed her visor.  She wanted to scream, to warn Jill to look out, but was frozen with fear.  Little did she realize that this was happening so fast that it was over before she could utter her first word.

The behemoth continued its rotation and the fin reached out and snatched Jill away.  Jill was focused on the satellite and never knew what was coming. The shuttle arm on which Jill was standing was ripped from its mount on the shuttle bay wall leaving behind a jagged wound.  A cloud of fragments that had once made up the base of the arm floated in the bay.  The force of the collision, combined with the gravitational tug from the asteroid, started the shuttle tumbling out of control, pulling the nose upward toward the asteroid as well as causing the shuttle to rotate about its centerline.

Miles of asteroid blazed by in a wink of an eye at almost a hundred thousand miles an hour and it took Jill along with it as it bore on toward its rendezvous with Earth.  Susan gasped as Jill disappeared before her eyes, and watched horrified as the beast literally punched a hole into the atmosphere. The air, being pushed aside by the asteroid, glowed red as it was compressed and superheated.  The asteroid itself began to glow as the superheated air started to heat its outer surface.  Soon it also began to tumble as its leading edge slowed faster than its trailing edge in the thickening atmosphere.  Susan watched the sight, unable to take her eyes off the asteroid until the shuttle’s own tumbling and spinning turned her view from the Earth to the darkness of space and back again, giving her glimpses of the disaster taking place.  The point of entry was quickly being taken out of view by the shuttle’s orbital motion.  The last thing Susan saw, or thought she saw, was the asteroid splitting into several pieces. 

The asteroid fragmented into three large chunks, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, from the stress of its rapid deceleration in the denser, lower atmosphere, and they began to separate from each other.  Two pushed their way deeper into the atmosphere and on toward the Atlantic coastline of the United States.  The third piece, Gamma, flatter but larger than its siblings, lifted above the others and shot back into space like a stone skipping across the surface of a calm lake. 

IV

“What the hell happened?” Ivan shouted over the noise of alarm bells and buzzers as he struggled to regain control of the shuttle.  Having been strapped into the pilot’s seat, he fared better than Jerry and Paul when the shuttle departed from its normal flight path.  They found themselves colliding with the nearest wall, ceiling or floor, as the shuttle turned without them because of the lack of gravity.  Jerry managed to pull himself back up to the arm station.  Paul was on the middeck, floating unconscious after a collision with the bulkhead.

“Jesus!  What was that?  Ivan, what the hell is going on?  Did we have another thruster malfunction?” Jerry yelled.  As he pulled himself up and peered out of the viewport, Jerry knew it was more than a thruster malfunction. “Oh my God! She’s gone.  The whole goddamn arm is gone!  Susan!!  Jill!!  Do you copy?”

“What do you mean the arm is gone,” Ivan called, still fighting to bring the shuttle’s wild tumbling under control.

“The damn arm is gone!  Nothing’s left and I don’t see Jill or Susan…Susan!!  Jill!!  Can you hear me?” After a few moments of silence Jerry suddenly realized that they had not heard from Paul either.  He keyed the intercom, “Paul, do you copy?  Paul, are you all right, do you copy?” Jerry was hanging on as best as he could while the shuttle began to slowly respond to Ivan’s inputs on the steering thrusters.

“Christ!” came Ivan’s only reply.  He had his hands full trying to stabilize the shuttle from its disorienting tumble. “Hang on, Jerry…I’ve almost got…this…under control.”

Jerry could feel the shuttle slowing from its end-over-end tumble, and shortly thereafter its wild rotation was tamed.  He was glad Ivan was in the pilot’s seat, because if it were up to him, the shuttle would be doomed, he thought.

“Susan, Jill, do you copy?  Can you hear me?” Jerry’s gaze drifted from the payload bay, to the control panel for the arm, searching for something to re-establish his sense of reality but only finding disbelief in the moment at hand.  No simulations had prepared him for this!  Slowly he emerged from the mental haze and confusion and realized that there was nothing he could do at the moment for Susan and Jill.  He made his way down to the middeck to look for Paul.

As the shuttle tumbled, Susan found herself pinned against the bulkhead where she had cowered. Slowly she came out of the fog of the last moments and began to realize that there were real voices calling out to her: it was not a dream. She looked around the cargo bay through her damaged visor at the torn, tattered insulation and padding and noticed that the arm was no longer on the wall across from her and neither was Jill: just a stubby remnant of her tether slowly gyrated back and forth.  Her brain now replayed the events of the last thirty seconds in excruciating detail, and she found herself shaking uncontrollably. The sound of Ivan and Jerry’s voices brought some comfort to her and she finally found enough strength to reply to their calls.

“I’m here,” Susan’s quavering voice came as a whisper.

“Susan!  Are you all right” Ivan called out, “Is Jill okay?”

“Ah, I’m okay.  Jill…” Susan’s voice trailed off as the reality of Jill’s demise sank in.

“Susan, what about Jill?” Jerry asked.

Susan tried to focus and pulled herself upright.  The scar the tile fragment left on her visor distorted her view of the bay, and combined with the fears of the moment, made her very sick to her stomach. “Ah…Jill’s gone…It took her.”

“Oh, God,” she heard Jerry mutter, “What do you mean, ‘it took her’?  What took her?” he spoke louder, getting more impatient with not knowing what happened.

Ivan cut in, “Susan, can you make it inside?  Are you injured?”

“I think…ahh…I think I can get back in,” Susan was having trouble getting her body moving.  Slowly she began to feel the strength flow back into her arms and legs.

“I will suit up and come out to help you,” Ivan said.

“No, I think I can make it…just give me a minute.”

“Jerry, can you see Paul,” Ivan asked.

“Yes, I’m with him. He must have hit the wall when we tumbled and was out for a few minutes.  He might have a slight concussion, but he’s conscious now.  What’s our status, Ivan?”

“We are showing an internal pressure drop, I think we are venting cabin air somewhere. We should get into our pressure suits until we can locate the leak.  The ship is finally stabilized and we have a number of other warning lights on systems that have been reset.  I think a lot of those are related to the damaged arm and the payload bay.”

“Have you talked to Mission Control?” Jerry asked.

“I had them on the line just before we started to spin and all I have now is static. I am not sure if the whole communications system is down, there are no alarms showing for it.”

“Susan is on her way in,” Jerry said. “I’ll give her a hand and we’ll come up.”

The people spending the day on the beaches of sunny Florida had no idea that their world was going to come to an end in a cataclysmic event the likes of which the world has not seen in sixty million years.  The warm breeze that blew in from the ocean mingled with the sounds of children playing in the crashing surf.  Beach-goers basked in the sun while they listened to their radios and MP3 players; strains of rock and roll intermingled with booming pulses of rap, accented with wisps of a violin concerto from another terry-toweled oasis on the beach.  People talked to each other, shouted and laughed while others read or just snoozed.  Those temporary beach dwellers who were more active or observant, and were not focusing on other distractions the beach provided, noticed a very bright spot of light in the east.  It rapidly split into three dots of light with one of them fading while the other two grew brighter, bigger and separated farther apart.  In a matter of seconds, the closest ball of fire again split and pushed a large bright chunk tumbling downward toward the sea.  These unfortunate people never had time to comprehend what they were seeing, never felt the impact of rock on the Earth. 

The half-mile-long chunk of the Alpha fragment crashed into the Atlantic, fifty miles from shore, while the main piece continued over the shoreline.  The shockwave of super-heated, compressed air that preceded the asteroid leveled everything in a swath over fifty miles wide on either side of its path.  The main piece of Alpha impacted land several miles inland creating an oblong crater that stretched almost a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide.  The impact literally severed Florida, or what was left of it, from the mainland of North America: Florida would forever now be an island.  The debris from the impact was ejected with such force that millions of tons of rock reached into low orbit.  Most of it would rain down on the Earth thousands of miles away.  Other pieces would stay in orbit until the atmospheric drag slowed them down enough to fall back to Earth as shooting stars. The bulk of the debris was thrown westward into the Caribbean and toward southern part of Alabama.

The portion of the Alpha fragment that landed in the Atlantic punched a hole in the ocean that was almost fifteen miles in diameter, creating tsunamis that flooded deep into the eastern coastline of the United States, and almost completely washed over central Florida.  The deadly waves continued far up the coast to the north hitting Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, obliterating towns and villages surrounding the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and Placentia and Hermitage Bays in Newfoundland.  Vaporized water funneled up the corridor formed in the atmosphere by the asteroid’s fiery entry and was deposited high in the upper atmosphere.

The Beta fragment continued further west, boosted by the impact blast from the Alpha fragment.  It finally crashed in Texas, between Houston and Austin.  This being the largest piece of the monster to land, it created the largest impact crater extending more than one hundred miles long by almost eighty miles wide.  It, like its brethren, hit at a shallow angle and sent the bulk of its ejecta on low trajectories westward into Mexico and New Mexico.

Susan had made her way across the bay to the airlock.  Pushing aside some debris that was floating in front of the hatch, she entered the airlock but turned back to take one last look at the payload bay before she closed the hatch.  She looked at the shattered cargo bay and saw the damage but nothing really registered in her mind.  Susan blinked to clear her vision and reached to pull the hatch closed.  With quivering muscles she strained to close the hatch and then stared dumbly at the indicator panel, which showed that the hatch seal was not secure.  She pulled on her tether to make sure that it was not caught in the door seal but it was free and floating about her.  Susan pushed the hatch open and looked out in the cargo bay.  Her eyes caught some movement in the bay and as she focused on it, she realized that it was Jill’s tether still attached to its mount on the airlock.  With a tug, Susan pulled the tether into the airlock and closed the hatch.  As she waited for the airlock to pressurize, she held Jill’s tether, stroking it softly with the thick gloves of her space suit.  She could not feel it, yet she drew comfort just from holding the last physical connection they had to Jill.  She closed her eyes and could feel her strength returning. As Susan thought about the last few hours of her life, she found herself getting more and more angry that she had not followed her intuition.  She did not contemplate what she would have done differently, that was for another place and time, when she had time on her hands.  All she knew now is that Jill would still be alive had she acted on her feelings.  This surge of anger brought Susan’s strength back even quicker, and by the time Jerry opened the hatch on the other side she was ready to do something about the mess they were in.

Jerry was startled when he saw the damaged visor on Susan’s helmet.  He didn’t say anything but could not help thinking how lucky she was, that whatever did this damage glanced off her helmet and was not a direct hit.  He helped her out of her suit and noticed how drained and pale she looked.  Paul was up and about with a bandage on his forehead from his encounter with the wall.  He gave Jerry a hand removing Susan’s suit.

“Paul, are you all right?” Susan asked as she squirmed out of her suit.

“Aside from a wicked headache, I’m okay.  How about you?  You’re not looking too good yourself.”

“I’m okay, a little shaken up, but I’ll be fine,” Susan replied.  She took a deep breath to compose herself as Ivan floated into the room.

“Susan, I am so glad to see you are okay,” Ivan said, in as professional a voice as he could muster. “What happened out there?”

“I should have gone with the damn dolphins!” Susan snapped, pushing past Ivan and heading up to the flight deck.  Jerry and Paul looked at each other and both shrugged their shoulders. They looked at Ivan for an explanation, but he was already heading out of the compartment following Susan to the flight deck.

“Susan, wait up!  What happened?  What are you doing?” Ivan called out.

“I want to check our fuel reserves,” Susan shouted over her shoulder. “We have to get into a higher orbit if we can.”

“Why do we need to do that?” Ivan asked, when he finally caught up with Susan, who was now studying the computer display of the shuttle’s status.

“Because of the debris cloud that we are going to pass through on our next orbit, if we do not get higher,” Susan said distractedly as she scrolled through the information on the screen.

“What debris cloud?  Susan, you are not making any sense.  What happened out there?” Ivan’s normally calm voice was showing signs of wear.

Susan looked up from the display and stared at Ivan for a moment.  Her face was expressionless as she processed the information she just retrieved from the computer.  Finally she answered, “Ivan, my dream wasn’t just a dream.  It was a prophecy, a premonition.  It all seems so clear now.  The beast that tried to kill me wasn’t an animal, it was an asteroid, a huge asteroid.  It nearly missed us, but it ripped off the shuttle’s arm, and took Jill with it, and then entered the atmosphere up range of the United States.” Susan’s voice was very level and calm. Ivan felt a chill run up his spine.  The implications of such a disaster were more than he wanted to contemplate at the moment—if that was what really happened. 

“I should have realized all this before,” Susan continued, “especially when I
saw
it occult that star.”

Ivan interrupted, “Susan, are you sure that is what happened?  The mind plays tricks…”

Susan’s eyes grew cold as she stared at Ivan. “I was there,” she said.  “I know what I saw and what I felt. I don’t know why I dreamt about it, or why it affected me as it did, but that’s in the past and we need to move now or we will not survive another orbit.”

“If it was an asteroid, how can you tell how big it was?  It all happened so fast.” Ivan said. 

“Ivan, it was an asteroid.  It was miles long.  It seemed like it took forever to pass by, slowly turning and twisting, and when it hit the atmosphere the air turned red.” Susan’s voice trailed off as she saw the scene replay itself again in her mind’s eye.

“The ionization trail…that might explain why we lost communications with Mission Control just as we started to tumble,” Ivan said half to himself.  By this time, Jerry and Paul had made their way up to the flight deck and overheard the last of the conversation.

“You mean to tell me that an asteroid took off the arm? And it was miles long?” Jerry asked Susan in disbelief.

“I am telling you what I saw,” Susan replied coldly.