Death Orbit (36 page)

Dominique’s smile widened a bit. It was the usual reaction when he got something right—finally.

“I’m a spirit,” she gently corrected him. “I’m my
own
spirit, in fact. That’s what it’s all about. Or at least, that’s all I can tell you. Your spirit and your soul are one and the same and when you pass over; your spirit remains. It’s close to what a butterfly does, before…”

But now Hunter held up his hand. He felt like a thousand volts of electricity were running through him.

“Are you trying to tell me that you… that you’re
dead?”

Dominique’s smile faded a bit. Then she nodded once.

“It’s true, Hawk,” she whispered.

Hunter went numb, the first stage of denial. What was happening? How could Dominique be dead? He would have known, somehow.

He decided to argue that point.

“You couldn’t possibly be… deceased,” he said carefully. “I would know. I know the extent of my extrasensory abilities. Believe me, I know it when the wind changes by a fraction of a degree in any direction. I know when a bad guy’s airplane is going to spin out even before he does. I will feel the exact moment the sunrise cracks the horizon…

“If the woman I loved died, believe me, I’d
know
it.”

Dominique’s smile returned slightly, but it was still a sad one.

“You
will
know it,” she told him. “Soon. Very soon.”

Hunter began to say something else, but couldn’t. He just stared at her and she at him. Time was standing still.

“Until that happens,” she finally said, “you must know something. You must find out something. If you don’t, then every man, woman, and child on earth will be affected.”

Again Hunter tried to say something, but couldn’t.

“You have to find the Hubble telescope, get it working, and point it to the segment of space your instincts guide you to.”

Now Hunter almost laughed out loud. This was getting absurd. The ghost of his lifelong love was appearing to him—and telling him to find a space telescope that had probably been abandoned many years before.

“I just don’t believe this—or you, or anything connected to it,” he was finally able to mumble. “I just don’t believe it…”

Dominique smiled a little brighter, even as her image was beginning to fade.

“You will believe, Hawk,” she said. “Very soon.”

Hunter didn’t want her to go. What if this really
was
happening? What if this really
was
the last time he would ever see her? He was not prepared for this. She couldn’t leave him now.

But leaving she was. Her image was now nearly dissipated. Almost pathetically, he reached out to grab her, as if he could physically make her stay inside this airless box with him.

But it didn’t work. He wound up clutching nothing but empty space.

Her last words to him were, “Goodbye, Hawk. I love you very much…”

When Hunter emerged from the Zon air lock, he was already spinning out of control.

Never properly hooked to his tether, he began cartwheeling off into space, his arms and legs not moving, the faceplate in his helmet fogged with condensation. The girl called Eight saw him first. She was hanging on to her own tether just outside the air lock when Hunter went careening by. She tried to grab hold of him—it was obvious to her that something was wrong—but his boot proved to be just beyond her grasp. She began screaming into her radio mike to alert the others. Hunter was drifting away! In seconds, the four space walkers were swimming toward the Wingman.

It was Geraci and JT who reached him first. They were certain that he’d experienced a malfunction in his breathing apparatus and that he was suffocating, if not already unconscious. But when they yanked him back toward the Zon air lock, Hunter suddenly came alive again. He began waving them off and giving them the double thumbs-up sign, as if to say he was all right.

JT was having none of that, however; he knew something had just happened to his friend. Someone like Hunter just didn’t go drifting off into space. He went helmet-to-helmet with him and stared in through the foggy faceplate. He thought he saw Hunter’s face wet with tears.

“Jeezus, Hawk, what’s the matter?”

But again Hunter just waved him away.

“I got… I got a ventilator filter stuffed up,” he replied. “Lots of water inside here. It’s okay, though. I unplugged it… or something.”

JT stared at his friend for a long moment as they floated along, weightless in space. A clogged ventilator filter would cause a lot of condensation to build up quickly inside someone’s helmet—and make it appear as if they’d been crying. And JT would have fully bought Hunter’s story, if not for the look in Hunter’s eyes. JT had known Hunter for years; he’d never seen him look quite like this before.

“You sure you’re okay, buddy?” JT asked him again.

Hunter gave him a couple of friendly taps on his helmet.

“Just had a bad dream,” was his enigmatic reply.

They finally hooked up Hunter’s tether and then drifted back over to the Zon cargo bay doors, which were now about 10 feet away from the space station’s docking ring. The Zon would be the male functionary in this mating. Its docking mechanism was about six feet long and slightly conical in shape. The space station’s receptor was slightly oval, with a collar of gold-covered-padding encrusted with a couple dozen stainless steel springs. Close inspection of the space station’s orifice seemed to show that this particular docking ring had not been used very much, or at least, not recently.

“We can definitely do the deed,” Geraci told them all over their helmet intercom, pointing to the space station’s docking mechanism. “This looks like it works on a passive universal system. In other words, it will take any kind of docker we can put into it.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Ben urged.

Geraci and Cook drifted back to the Zon and retrieved the pair of thick cables that had been floating just to the rear of the air lock. These were auxiliary wires used to power an ICP, an “independent components package” that might be carried inside the cargo bay itself. For their purposes, though, the cables would act as the conduit through which the Zon would attempt to shock the space station.

To do this didn’t require any extra power to be sent through the wires, or a powering-down of any of the Zon’s systems. If the Zon had an overwhelmingly positive charge, it would be inherent in the spacecraft itself. It would be running through it whether all its systems were at full load or not. It could almost be equated to the spaceship’s “personality.” Crude, problematic, yet workmanlike, and imbued with just a little more positivity than negativity.

The gamble was whether the space station was just the opposite.

Cook volunteered to make the connection between the Zon and the space station. He took the pair of heavy cables in hand and drifted over to the area of the docking ring where he and Geraci had just removed the grounding damper. The two cables had clamps on their ends that looked exactly like the alligator clamps found on a pair of automobile starter cables. All Cook had to do was attach these clamps, one at a time, to the bottom of the space station’s docking ring. Then, if the Fifth Law of Repellent Forces was indeed on their side, the Zon would shock the big swastika into a massive short-circuit.

If the space station’s overall charge was more overwhelming than the Zon’s, then it would be the Americans who would be on the receiving end of the short-circuit. And that would be a disaster.

Cook finally positioned himself just a foot off the docking ring. Before he attached the first jumper cable, however, he did an odd thing. He took his taser, unraveled one of the lead wires, and tapped it onto the side of the docking ring. A tiny, almost imperceptible spark was the result. He looked back at the others, now crowded around the Zon’s air lock hatch, and gave them a shrug. His little experiment had proved that there were opposing charges at work here—now the only question was, whose would be the most powerful.

Cook stayed still for a long moment and then hooked up the first cable to a large bolt which had formerly served to hold the ground dampener on. Nothing happened, nor was anything expected to. The charge would become effective only when a circuit was made, meaning when the second wire was attached. Cook waited another few seconds, and then, like a man attempting to hook up a cable to a bawky car battery, he turned his face and body away and attached the second cable.

There was a huge spark of electricity—it was blue and green and yellow all at the same time. Cook was sent reeling of into space, his tether line quickly stretching beyond its limit. Everyone’s helmet radios died with a crack of static. Then the Zon began to shudder; frightening-looking sparks could be seen flowing from its nose and tail. One of the malfunctioning steering jets suddenly came alive and began spurting streams of gas. This started the entire spacecraft to wobbling; inside, Elvis was now fighting with the controls. JT and Geraci immediately pushed themselves off to go and retrieve Cook. He was floating and spinning and looked as if
he’d
been knocked out. For one devastating moment, it appeared that the plan had backfired, that the Zon had the weaker charge and was now short-circuiting itself to death.

But appearances could be deceiving.

It was Eight who saw it first. She was actually closest to the space station and had the clearest view of the double row of portholes which ran the length of the crooked arm all the way up to the hub. One by one, she could see the lights behind the portholes begin to blink off.

She tapped Ben twice and he in turn tapped Geraci, and now all three of them were watching as all the lights in the massive space station began blinking out, going faster and faster around the four arms. That’s when everyone’s helmet radios came back on and the Zon stopped shaking. Only then did everyone realize that their gamble had paid off. Their charge was more positive that the Nazi spacecraft.

The proof was in the seeing: within 20 seconds, the huge, well-lit space station had suddenly gone very cold.

It was a triumphant moment for the Americans. One of the boldest plans ever in UA history had just worked.

Yet through it all, one of the space walkers had hung back, a mere spectator in the bold gambit.

It was Hawk Hunter, uncharacteristically out of the action. He was floating in space, hooked to a loose tether, watching as the others performed all the heroics.

It was safe to say his mind was somewhere else.

Ten minutes later, they had all reentered the Zon and were now inside the darkened cargo bay, looking up from the Zon’s side of the docking mechanism.

Elvis had connected the spacecraft to the Nazi station with a letter-perfect maneuver and with no loss or drain of power.

Now Geraci and Cook were working on the common hatchway which would lead them into the space station itself. For safety reasons, everyone was still in their EVA suits, and everyone had their taser guns up and ready.

It took them five minutes to get the hatchway to open. Once they’d unlocked it, a rush of air pushed the door back in their faces—it swung open so quickly, everyone thought a horde of Nazi space goons was about to come pouring through. But it was just the reaction to two different air pressurization systems quickly leveling off. No one was behind the hatchway leading into the space station; the beams of JT’s powerful trouble light confirmed that. The passageway beyond was absolutely dark and empty.

Hunter was taking all this in, even as his mind continued spinning off in a million different directions. The whole space walk in which the Nazi spacecraft had been zapped seemed like a dream to him now, even though it had just happened not 15 minutes ago. Emblazoned on his eyes was not the sight of the enemy space station going dark, but Dominique’s face, smiling sadly as it faded from view, her last words still echoing in his ears.

Did it really happen? Had he really spoken with Dominique’s ghost? These questions were pounding inside him now like a heart that was about to burst from overuse. Why was this happening? He should be at his peak, about to fulfill his long-anticipated quest of finally capturing the world’s most dangerous villain; but his mind was everywhere but on the matter at hand.

He took a series of long, deep breaths from his oxygen hose. Maybe he
had
suffered from a brief period of post-atmospheric narcolepsy. Maybe he
had
just imagined the whole thing. Maybe Dominique was alive and well and waiting for him back at Skyfire, as always. Or maybe she’d found out somehow about his relationship with Chloe—and this was just a guilty conscience playing tricks on him.

Whatever the case, he had to put it all on hold—at least, until they finished their work inside the space station. And maybe for a long time after that as well.

Geraci finally secured the hatchway into the space station, and now the route lay open to them. As previously planned, JT and Ben went in first, tasers high, trouble lights flashing. Hunter, his weapon up, his mind clearing, was floating right on their heels.

They were drifting vertically into the space station’s terminal module, heading up to the right-angled twist, which in turn would lead into the main hub. The space station looked on the inside just like it did out: heavy steel planks, lots of nuts and bolts and welds and rivets. They just couldn’t get over the feeling that they were actually skin divers moving through the wreck of a World War II German battleship. Nothing they could see looked any older than 1945.

They floated up about 40 feet, Hunter, JT, and Ben in the vanguard, Cook, Geraci, and Eight bringing up the rear. There were no side doors or hatchways inside the passageway; instead, the walls were adorned with items of Nazi regalia: Iron Crosses, swords, medals, sashes, all of them encased in separate glass displays, almost as if they were part of a museum or a hall of fame of some kind.

“I’ve got dibs on the souvenirs,” JT whispered into his helmet mike.

They continued on, passing a series of brightly colored murals, very Germanic-looking paintings applied directly to the passageway wall. Many depicted various Nazi bigwigs as conquering, benevolent heroes, entering “liberated” towns with the local population lined up and cheering them on. One showed Hitler himself as a white knight on a horse, in a shining suit of armor, complete with lance and shield and carrying a huge Nazi flag. It was the most ridiculous of the lot.