Pillar to the Sky (28 page)

“I’m not an angel,” Singh snapped. “I’m captain of this mission and I screwed up.”

Her two male companions could not help but laugh for a few seconds at that.

“All right, Captain,” Malady replied, “but don’t cuss me out. Now, here goes…”

He twisted the coupling to her EVA boot, unlocking it, and as he did so she gasped and let fly with some decidedly unladylike comments. Kiribati control maintained a secured shut down on the comm link, blocking off what was happening to the rest of the world, the staff listening in on the secured channel, in spite of the anxiety there was more than one smile over her command of Anglo-Saxon expletives. It showed as well that she was still very much alive.

Kevin and Tom’s comments were instantly added as the blood that had pooled in Singh’s boot now floated out in the zero-gravity environment. The emergency patch Kevin had slapped on her boot had saved her life from depressurization but, of course, had done nothing to staunch the flow of blood from three severed toes, her “pinky” toe up to her middle toe; her big toe and second toe had been cut open at the tips but not completely severed.

“MB One, Kiribati here. How is she?”

For a moment Kevin did not even answer as he tried to figure out how to stop the blood cascading out of her severed digits, forming globules that floated about the cabin. He had the sun shield visor up but was still in his suit, a globule of blood splattering against the inner faceplate. He tore his helmet off and let it float free while Tom pulled out the emergency medical kit, which had been packed with everything up to and including a full surgical kit and defibrillator.

“Damn it, someone answer!”

It was the Brit, his voice finally penetrating through the cacophony of chatter.

“Kevin here, sir.”

“What in bloody hell happened?”

Kevin gave a brief rundown, during which Singh remained stoically silent as Tom maneuvered the top half of her EVA suit off. As soon as he pushed it clear, he jabbed her forearm with a morphine surret. She cussed at him over that, saying she didn’t need it, but he ignored her complaints.

“I’m putting the doc on the line now.” Franklin snapped. “Listen to him. Tell him exactly what you see and follow his directions.”

Kevin followed the doctor’s directions as they were passed up to him. He now had a video link on the wound and was more than a bit annoyed when the doctor exclaimed, almost with professional admiration, that a surgeon’s laser or knife could not have done a cleaner cut and even mused about trying to retrieve her toes to sew them back on.

The compresses were secured while Tom, giving perhaps the first IV transfer in the history of space flight and zero-g medicine, inserted an IV of plasma into Singh’s arm and, since there was no gravity to provide a proper drip, gently squeezed the bag, forcing the contents into her.

The bleeding eased and then stopped. Singh was less than amused when Kevin insisted upon pulling off the lower half of her IV suit, since she did not even have a jumpsuit on underneath. Without asking for permission, he scissored off the long johns underneath to check her leg to make sure there was no damage from depressurization or frostbite. Though a bit drugged, she was still lucid and asked for at least a pair of shorts, which Kevin handed to her; in spite of her pain and a touch of drowsiness from the injury, she slipped them on while the two men made a point of trying to politely look the other way.

“MB One, Kiribati. This is Franklin. Prepare for immediate undocking and emergency return.”

With that, Singh stirred.

“Repeat, please.”

Franklin repeated the command.

“Ah, sir, may I speak frankly.”

“Of course, MB One.”

“Open mike.”

“If you wish.”

“Fine, then. Sir, fire me when we get back for my screwup. But as to abandoning mission before completion, you can go to hell.”

There was a pause, and she could actually hear some laughter in the background after the last half hour of tension and fear.

No response came back.

“We came up here for a mission. OK, I screwed up and sliced some toes off. It’ll hurt like hell once the painkiller wears off, but then what? Whether we get back two days from now or three it won’t change things much here for me. And whoever the doctor is, tell him he’s an idiot. I am not sending my two comrades out to look for my missing toes, which are by now frozen stiff anyhow. We see the final deployment and lock into place, then we come home—and that, sir, is final.”

There was no reply.

The laughter had drifted off to silence.

“MB One to Kiribati,” and she fought to control her voice as if it were a matter-of-fact transmission, “anything else you need us to do other than monitor reel deployment?”

“No…” A pause. “God bless you. Will keep you advised if there is. We have twenty hours to touchdown of the first wire. Wish us luck.”

“Good luck down there,” Singh replied. “I asked for a mission and I got it. Now, do it right down there.”

She paused.

“After this, I think my flight days are over,” she sighed mournfully, “so might as well do my job while I can.”

“Not by a long shot,” came the reply from Franklin. “You’ve only just started flying, Captain Singh.”

12

“Two hours and eleven minutes to touchdown and counting. We have visual on the descent stage.”

More than a few of the “hangers-on,” the major investors, and the four pool reporters allowed on the platform were outside, gazing up, binoculars raised, as if they could actually see something through the scattering of afternoon tropical clouds. On the monitor, though, the image was clear. The Brit’s “mother ship one” was circling at a maximum altitude of just over 60,000 feet, cameras trained on the two-ton thruster, the nearly invisible wire trailing behind it.

Now was the time to sweat. One of the multitude of reasons for choosing Kiribati was its weather. Typhoons and hurricanes were all but unknown along the equator. It was a zone free of earthquakes as well, but that was not to say that heavy equatorial thunderstorms might not occur due to the strong convections triggered by the boiling equatorial heat over the ocean.

They were committed, there was no turning back, and a major thunderstorm engulfing the thruster and its wire just prior to anchoring—buffeting it with updrafts and downdrafts that could exceed a hundred miles an hour—could be a disaster.

The local islanders, so enthusiastic for this project to succeed and perhaps eventually save their homeland, had even indulged in an ancient ritual, to appease the ocean and pray for calm seas and blue skies. It had appeared to work, at least in their eyes, but winds aloft at 40,000 feet were brisk at over 100 miles per hour and fuel for the descent stage was down to less than 5 percent. It was going to be a nail-biter. The last-ditch alternative, which literally was last-ditch, if the descent unit ran out of fuel was to let it drop into the ocean, hopefully close by, with a ship standing by to try to pick it up and tow it to the platform. Risky all around with 23,000-plus miles of wire behind it.

To add to the anxiety, warships of several nations were hovering at the edges of Kiribati waters; a no-fly zone of one hundred nautical miles had already been declared by the island nation based on extending its claims outward to several atolls that barely broke the surface at low tide. Kiribati had no army, no air force, no means of enforcing its sovereign rules, and for the moment its appeals to New Zealand and Australia for some kind of protective efforts had disappeared into bureaucratic double-talk. Half a dozen other ships, identities murky, were nearby as well, and there had been rumors of some sort of terrorist attempt. The long-term implications of what the Pillar might bode for global oil demand just might induce some entity to pass money and the technology of a surface-to-air missile to another entity.

Though considering himself something of a persona non grata in his home country at the moment, Franklin had pleaded hard with several senators who were indeed on his side and that of NASA, and the day before, an Aegis-class cruiser had positioned itself off the island nation, thanks to their friend Senator Dennison’s direct appeal to the president. Though not outright stated, the message was that if a missile was launched at the thruster, it would fire to shoot the attacking missile down, for the logical reason that the “wire,” if loose and unanchored, could pose a serious threat to navigation, both within the atmosphere and in space. Two hours earlier the Aegis had fired up its high-gain X-band radar, the preliminary to a near-instant launch of an antimissile if required. It had also deployed a number of passive listening devices and active sonar buoys in the surrounding waters to detect any submarine activity.

Thus Franklin and his team were not entirely on their own. The only threat that did bear some weight was that one news channel aircraft circling outside the no-fly zone actually strayed a few miles in until warned in no uncertain terms that if they did not turn about at once, the network would be forever banned from entering the country. The Brit had personally called the CEO of the network on that one, and within seconds the message was conveyed to the wandering aircraft.

Gary, conceding he needed a wheelchair on this day, sat in front of a wide-screen monitor, Eva by his side and joined now by Victoria, watching the images being fed back from the Brit’s high-circling aircraft, which focused in on the descent stage, thrusters pulsing to counteract the lateral force of the wisps of air of the upper atmosphere. There were occasional glints off the cable catching the afternoon sun. It seemed taut, rigid.

“I wish we had a read on the stress load,” Gary whispered. “If it severs now…”

“It won’t sever,” Victoria whispered reassuringly.

“Fifty thousand feet, winds at 72 knots, bearing 235 degrees—all looks nominal.”

The thruster had rotated on its axis, putting one of its engines in direct opposition to the crosswind, firing pulses every few seconds.

“We have good comm between ground and the package,” the mission director announced. “We are on the beam; it is coming straight in.”

No one spoke now. It was out of the control of everyone present except for the mission director, the communications tech monitoring the computer guidance linking the base on the platform to the thruster, and a young lady, not much older than Victoria, who was working a joystick and wearing a headset that gave her a stereo-optical view from the camera mounted to the bottom of the thruster. The camera had just switched on, and there was a two-dimensional image up on the main screen of the platform below.

The twelve-acre platform that was its target was lost to view as clouds shifted between it and the ground; when this happened a radar image of a blinking target appeared in the center of the screen, which now started to shift to the left. The young lady added more thrust, lining it back up.

“Fuel at 2 percent,” the mission director whispered. She nodded, saying nothing, looking almost alien with her stereoview headset covering most of her face, the only giveaways her tension, the tight set of her jaw, and the sweat trickling down the back of her neck, staining her T-shirt.

“Twenty thousand feet. We have visual from the ground.”

Gary spared a quick glance at a secondary monitor, a camera mounted on the platform magnifying to high gain, showing the boxlike unit descending. The dynamics playing out were the tension and drag of the wire clear back to geosynch and the lateral force of the wind, which, the closer the unit got to the surface, would now start to play on the wire itself, even if it was but two millimeters wide. There were no monitors built into the cable itself to measure stress loads of tension, compression, and lateral forces; those would come later. The only source of actual data was from the thruster, its read on the tension imparted to it by the attached cable, which was approaching 90 percent of tensile strength as the thruster pulled it down through the atmosphere, and from the astronaut crew monitoring from the deployment reel, which was still spinning out cable. The cable, once anchored, would actually be slack for nearly a thousand miles as the earth rotated, the centrifugal force imparted by that rotation whipping it along. The reel would then start to climb up and away from geosynch, laying out the last of the cable on board to act as additional counterweight to pull the cable taut. As more strands were then woven on, the reels would eventually act as a counterweight, holding the wire rigid and in place.

The crisis was at hand and the thousands of hours of calculations and speculations by Gary, Eva, and their team about this moment were now about to be proven out. Would the drag of the cable actually overcome the power of the thruster so that it dangled helplessly just short of its goal and then was actually whipped back into space? He half wished the backup of using a plane with a snag—the way the early photo recon satellites of the 1960s would be caught while dropping through the upper atmosphere—had been adopted, but the risk to the crew would have been infinitely worse than what the three astronauts had just faced. A loose cable caught up in a turbojet intake would shear the plane in half in a heartbeat.

“One percent fuel remaining, at 8,500 feet, descending 135 feet per second. One-minute warning.”

Eva muttered in Ukrainian about someone making up their mind once and for all to use kilometers.

Victoria drifted from their side to move half a dozen feet over to the young lady remotely piloting the thruster. They had become rather good friends during the weeks of planning and her training leading up to this moment. Gretchen, who had started as an intern like Victoria, just had an uncanny knack for playing computer simulator games, trouncing Victoria, Jason, and anyone else on the team. Word had reached Franklin through Victoria as to Gretchen’s skills as they planned out exactly how to do this, and now the twenty-five-year-old was playing the ultimate game: dropping the thruster with wire attached into the middle of the platform and guiding it down into its locking port, lined with carbon nanotubing, which would shut around it. It would then be wrapped with anchoring cables, also of carbon nanotubing, looking like vast oversize vise grips driven by hydraulic pistons encasing the first dozen meters of the precious cable, holding it firmly in place.