Rescue Mode - eARC (17 page)

The screen showed a clip of two astronauts working in spacesuits outside a space station in Earth orbit.

Treadway continued, “Going from the pressurized cabin of the
Arrow
to the vacuum of space is not as simple as putting on a spacesuit and opening a hatch. Without pre-breathing low-pressure oxygen and taking the proper precautions, the astronauts could succumb to the bends and even die. First observed in deep-sea divers, the bends is caused by the human body going from normal air pressure to the much lower pressure of a diving suit or a spacesuit. Nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream, causing severe pain, debilitation and even death. Fortunately the crew is trained in how to prevent this, and they’re taking those steps now.”

Turning part-way toward the big wall screen, so that he stood in profile against the image of the battered
Arrow
, Treadway said fervently, “Good luck, Commander Benson and Amanda Lynn. Good luck to all of the crippled
Arrow
’s gallant crew.”

He turned back to face the TV camera for a closeup. “Steven Treadway reporting.”

July 22, 2035

Earth Departure Plus 99 Days

03:40 Universal Time

Extravehicular Activity

Like most space missions, the
Arrow
ran on Universal Time, so it was already past three a.m. on July 22 when Benson and Lynn emerged from the main airlock, trailing long flexible tethers.

Bee yawned inside his bubble helmet, thinking,
Maybe we should have waited and got a night’s sleep before doing this.
Then he immediately answered himself,
Right. Like you could sleep.

As he moved carefully hand over hand across the grips that studded
Arrow
’s exterior, Benson surveyed the damage the ship had suffered. The ship’s exterior lights illuminated its massive frame and modules clearly.

Benson could see a fine mist of water leaking from the bladder just under the habitat’s outer skin. He had no way of knowing how much water had already been lost, but losing any of the precious stuff was losing too much.

Hydrogen propellant was leaking from the Trans-Earth Injection tanks, propellant they would need when the time came to break free of Mars orbit and start the journey back to Earth. The TEI tanks were nearly three hundred feet from where he hovered, tethered to one of the handgrips, on the other side of the propellant tanks they would use to enter Mars orbit. Between Benson and the TEI tanks was the mangled section of the main truss.

“What a mess,” he muttered.

Amanda, hovering on her own tether a dozen feet from him, said in an awed voice, “The impact shattered the truss almost completely.”

“And some of the debris must’ve arced over and hit the water bladder and TEI tanks.”

“So what do you want me to do?” she asked.

“First things first,” he said. “Follow me.”

Carefully keeping his tether from snagging on any of the damaged truss sections, Benson crept hand-over-hand toward the water leak. Lynn followed close behind him. He could hear her breathing hard from the exertion.

He was already sweating inside the EVA suit.

“How’re you doing, Amanda?”

“Okay. Fine. I guess.”

He knew that although Amanda was a biologist and not an astronaut, she had been cross-trained for EVA work, just like the rest of the crew. She had done several spacewalks on the International Space Station.

She’ll be fine,
he told himself. Still, he kept one eye on her. Don’t want to lose her, or get her hurt.

At last he reached the spot where the water was leaking. The hole wasn’t particularly large, but the water was spraying out like a fountain. The plume rose into the blackness of space, rather than the blue sky of Earth, water droplets immediately condensing into ice pellets and forming a contrail the swept outward as far as his eyes could see. Not good.

“Amanda, we need to stop the leak without letting the ice crystals cover our suits or, more importantly, our helmets. The last thing we can afford is to go blind out here.”

“How much water do you think we’ve already lost, Bee?”

“Hard to say. Too much, whatever it is. We’ll probably have to ration water for the rest of the trip, even if we can stop the leak now. So let’s get to it.”

Patching the water leak was surprisingly easy. Benson was able to position himself on the side opposite from the spray of spewing ice crystals out. Gripping the patch carefully in his gloves, he pushed it directly into the stream. For a moment he was afraid that he’d misjudged and deflected the plume onto Amanda, but he got the hole covered and she smeared epoxy generously around the edges of the patch.

Smiling to himself, Benson remembered that the epoxy set much better in the vacuum of space than in air.

“That does it,” he said.

“Less than an hour,” Ted Connover’s voice sounded in his helmet earphones. “Good work, Bee.”

“Thanks. Taki—we’re going aft to take a look at the propellant leak. How’s our vitals?”

Nomura, inside the infirmary studying the readouts from their suit sensors, replied, “Vital signs all in the normal range, except for overheating a bit. Turn up your suit fans, Bee. You too, Amanda.”

Benson tapped the key on his wristpad and heard the fans whine a little higher.

“You’ve got a little more than five hours of oxygen supply,” Nomura went on. “You’re good to go.”

“Okay,” said Benson. “Amanda, you ready?”

“Ready.”

He looked aft along the handholds that ran down the truss toward the massive propellant tanks. The TMI tanks looked intact. No apparent damage.
We’ll have the propellant we need to go into orbit around Mars
, Benson knew.
Good.

But the TEI tanks were leaking, too, even though he could not see an obvious plume spouting from them. The ship’s sensors reported they were losing propellant.
Could the sensors be wrong?
Benson wondered.
Maybe the impact of the collision knocked them off.

Too good to be true,
he thought.
We’ll have to go down there and see what’s what. If we’ve lost as much as the sensors say, we might not have enough for the Trans-Earth Injection burn. We’ll be stranded at Mars.

Pushing those fears to the back of his mind, Benson looked at the mangled mess of broken crosspieces and twisted aluminum struts where the collision had occurred. Of the twelve crosspieces, only two remained undamaged. Furthermore, only two were holding the ship together.

“Ted,” he called, “we’ll have to do something to strengthen the damaged section of the truss. Otherwise, the stress when we ignite the nuclear rocket for the Mars capture burn will probably make them buckle and break.”

“Don’t want that,” said Connover.

“Amen.”

“I’ll ask the bright boys back home to give us some ideas,” Connover said. “Uh, Bee, I just got a batch of bad news. Mission control has studied the telemetry and they say we’ve lost a lot of propellant. A lot. Their calculations say that if the leak isn’t patched in the next seven to eight hours we won’t have enough H2 to get home. The LAD isn’t working well and they say we might already have passed that point. They’re also worried about the water leak. It was huge.”

Benson frowned. The Liquid Acquisition Device—LAD in NASA’s infinite jungle of acronyms—was the sensor in the propellant tankage that monitored the amount of liquid hydrogen remaining in the tank. Benson knew LAD readings could be off by as much as ten percent in zero gee, but from the sound of Connover’s voice, the situation was even more serious.

“We’d better get down there, then, and patch the leak,” he said.

“Bee, should Hi and I get ready to come out in case you can’t fix it in time? It’ll take us three hours to prebreathe pure oxy.”

“Right. Get started. We might need some extra hands out here.”

July 22, 2035

04:14 Universal Time

Earth Departure plus 99 Days

The White House

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

For this special briefing to the news media, the reporters and commentators had been assembled in the classically decorated East Room, which was large enough to hold them all, plus the dozens of photographers, bloggers, and camera crews. Though a few of the participants were wearing VR equipment, they still hadn’t been able to convince the White House to allow them to physically interact with the president during one of these events, an interactive engagement that would undoubtedly raise viewership by orders of magnitude for the organization that was able to pull it off.

They all got to their feet as President Harper strode in, wearing a dark blue business suit and carefully knotted gold tie, which complemented the gold and white decór of the venerable room.

His podium had been set up beneath Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington, which had been saved from destruction by Dolley Madison when the British army burned the Executive Mansion during the War of 1812.

Harper felt bone weary, physically and emotionally exhausted by this long day’s news from the Mars mission. But he glanced up at the painting and reminded himself that this house had seen its share of excruciatingly difficult times.

Turning a weary smile to the news people, he motioned for them to be seated.

“First, I want to thank you all for coming out so late in the evening. I had considered holding this briefing tomorrow morning, but the American public—and the world—shouldn’t have to wait all night to learn what’s happened to the
Arrow
and her crew.”

Harper went through a succinct description of the accident that had struck the Mars-bound spacecraft: the collision, the damage to the ship, the crew’s reaction.

“I’ve got to say,” he concluded, “that Commander Benson and all his crew have come through this very difficult and demanding experience with flying colors. There was only one injury, a slight bump on the head, to the ship’s meteorologist, Mikhail Prokhorov.”

Several dozen hands shot into the air and the room filled with urgent cries of “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

Harper hesitated as he noticed his wife standing at the rear of the room with Ilona Klein, his news media chief. He nodded to his wife as he called on the reporter from
Space Live!
, hoping that it would be a softball. It wasn’t.

From his seat in the front row,
Space Live!
reporter Adrienne Anderson asked the most important question of them all. “Will the crew survive this accident?”

“They’ve survived so far,” Harper replied. “Their life support equipment is undamaged and their morale is excellent.”

“But it’s been reported that one or more of their fuel tanks has been punctured. Will they be able to continue the mission?”

Harper said tightly, “We intend to.”

Without waiting to be called on, Fox News’ Gloria Miller—bright, blonde and brassy—asked, “Will they have sufficient propellant to go all the way to Mars and back?”

“They’re coasting to Mars right now, so they won’t use any propellant until they have to go into orbit around the planet.”

The next dozen questions all harped on the propellant issue. President Harper temporized by telling them that the top experts at NASA were working on the problems raised by the propellant leakage.

At last a lean, lanky, potbellied younger man got to his feet. “Len Eames, the
Science Daily Show
. I’m sure you’re aware that Senator Donaldson has called for an end to all manned space missions. Doesn’t this accident prove his point, that it’s too risky to send humans into space?”

Harper had been waiting for that one. His jaw set and his eyes focused on the nearest TV camera, he answered, “It was risky to cross the Mississippi and settle the west. It was risky to first fly airplanes. It was risky to go to the Moon. But brave men and women took those risks and we’re all better off for it.”

“Yes,” Eames said, “but Senator Donaldson intends to bring his proposition before the Senate Subcommittee on Space. What’s your reaction to that, sir?”

Bristling, President Harper replied, “There will be no cutting of the manned space program while I’m President of the United States.”

But he knew that he was already a lame duck, with little more than eighteen months to remain in office.

July 22, 2035

04:20 Universal Time

Earth Departure Plus 99 Days

Extravehicular Activity

As Benson and Lynn worked their way cautiously across the damaged section of truss and headed toward the leaking propellant tank, Virginia Gonzalez’s voice sounded in their headphones.

“Bee, the video feed from your helmet is crystal clear, but the feed from Amanda’s has a lot of static. Her audio is fine, so whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to video only.”

Benson puffed out a breath. He knew that if this were an ordinary spacewalk—as if any spacewalk was ordinary—then the flight rules would require that Amanda return to the airlock and end her EVA as quickly as possible. The camera feed was considered mission critical, for safety reasons. The rules were quite clear.

But this wasn’t an ordinary spacewalk.

“Noted,” he said to Gonzalez. “Amanda will stay with me unless something else goes off nominal. I need her help.”

“Copy that.”

“How’re Ted and Hi doing?”

He could sense Virginia’s shrug. “They’re down at the main airlock, prebreathing oxygen and getting into their EVA suits.”

“Right,” said Benson.

Only then did he look across toward Amanda to see if his decision was okay with her. He felt grimly pleased when she gave him a silent “thumbs up.”

“Okay, kid,” he said to her. “We’ve got a propellant leak to fix.”

“Let’s do it,” Amanda said.

“Right.” He turned back to face the mangled truss. “Now we have to figure out how to get across the damaged area and down to the aft tank so we can figure out how to patch the damned thing.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve got to cross over the damage using what’s left of the handholds, and without snagging our suits on the broken spars. Then we have to make sure our tethers reach across without getting caught or cut. Sharp edges and spacesuits just don’t get along.”