Death Orbit (16 page)

“What are you going to tell me?” he asked his friend. “That this is all just a bad dream?”

JT hesitated a moment, then slowly nodded.

“Well, yes,” he replied. With that, he quickly briefed Hunter and the others on what he and Geraci had just heard via the radio call from Yaz. The world below had suddenly gone crazy. Wars and titanic battles were breaking out all over, not the least of which was on the Florida Keys and around the Kennedy Space Center. There were nukes in Cuba. The Cult battleships had been spotted. The long-missing remnants of the Fourth Reich Air Force had reemerged, and even the heathen Norsemen had somehow returned.

Hunter and the others listened to the report with open mouths and sinking spirits.

“None of this makes sense,” Hunter finally said. “If someone wanted to destroy the space complex, the last thing they would do is send in an army of drunken slobs…”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” JT told him. “I’ll bet they’re trying to capture it, not destroy it… maybe to launch something of their own.”

This sent a chill down everyone’s spine. While supporting control from the space complex would be crucial for the Zon’s eventual reentry, Hunter was confident he could set the spacecraft down somewhere if the complex was no longer in friendly hands. But should that be the case, it would mean that the lives of a lot of his friends and colleagues—not to mention the heart of the UAAF command—would be in peril or even dead, and that the UA’s infant space program might end with exactly one flight.

“Who knows what those A-holes might be planning,” JT went on. “Maybe they’ve been able to get into a stockpile of Arienes or…”

But Hunter wasn’t listening anymore. His body had suddenly commenced vibrating. Somewhere in the depths of his extraordinary inner being, a message was coming through.

JT was staring at him intently—everyone on board the Zon was. They’d seen him like this before.

“Jeezus, what is it, Hawk?” JT asked him. “Another space bomb?”

Hunter slowly shook his head.

“No, not exactly,” he replied.

Ben did a quick check of the forward radar set. He didn’t see anything unusual—at least, not at first.

Hunter leaned forward in his seat and stared up through the Zon’s top window. Way up into the perpetual dark night, he saw a tiny greenish speck of light twinkling among the stars.

“Son of gun,” he whispered to himself. “Will you look at that…”

Inside of 30 minutes, Hunter had maneuvered the Zon to a position about 32 miles above their former orbital path.

The small green twinkling light he’d spotted was now just a mile in front of them. Everyone in the Zon had his nose pressed up against the front windshield, trying to get a better look at the strange object.

It was bulbous yet cylindrical—and as battered as the Zon, even more so. There was a miniature light on the ass end, blinking intermittently. The object was tumbling in such a way that the light caused streaks to reflect off the Zon’s windshield.

“Is that what I think it is?” Elvis asked, verbalizing what the rest of the crew suspected.

“It’s an old Soyuz,” Hunter confirmed. “Looks like something from the seventies—or even earlier.”

The Soyuz was a Russian equivalent to a cross between NASA’s old Gemini capsules and the later space shuttles. Big enough to carry just two or three crew members, the Soyuz crafts were more like space taxis. In the later years, they were the means by which the Russians sent supplies and replacement crews up to the orbiting Mir space station.

But what was this one doing up here, tumbling and obviously out of control? Something inside Hunter was telling him he should find out.

“Anyone up for stretching their legs?” he asked, unstrapping himself from his seat for the first time in more than two days.

The five other crew men looked at each other and then back at Hunter.

“You mean you’re going over to that thing?” JT asked him. “How come?”

Hunter just shrugged.

“If we’re going to be up here a while,” he said. “I think we should get to know the neighborhood.”

An hour later, Hunter and Geraci were inside two of the Zon’s half-dozen EVA suits.

Bulky yet tight, the suits made them look more like deep-sea divers than two humans ready to make a space walk. Like everything else aboard the Zon, the “outdoor” spacesuits were crude and uncomfortable, and patched in more than a few places.

Geraci went through the pressure lock first. In its present state, the Zon was equipped to handle only one spacewalker at a time. Hunter waited patiently as Geraci depressurized the lock and slowly opened the hatch to space beyond. He floated away almost immediately, reappearing once he’d reached the end of his life-tether. A wave and a thumbs-up indicated everything was working.

Now it was Hunter’s turn.

He slipped into the pressure lock and secured the door behind him. Working the controls from the other side, Cook and Ben set the depressurization process in motion. Hunter could feel a slightly deflating effect on his suit as all the air left the chamber. Then he gave a thumbs-up to his colleagues, opened the outer hatch, and joined Geraci in space.

Wow…

Now
this
was something. He was floating—though floating wasn’t really the word. He was flying, too—though flying wasn’t the right word, either. What was it, then? He had to think about it for a moment. Then it came to him. It sounded crazy, but he felt like he was just another body in the universe, revolving, spinning, moving in unison with the zillion other objects in the cosmos. A whole world unto himself.

Christ, what a feeling it was!

Almost good enough for him to forget what a miserable experience the spaceflight had been so far…

Geraci’s somewhat frantic signaling broke Hunter out of his self-induced space rapture.

Hunter’s tether was slowly becoming entangled in one of the many unsightly projections hanging off the blunderbusslike Zon. He was able to retrieve the slack before any real trouble could occur, knocking himself upside the head twice for letting his inner senses get the best of him.

He joined Geraci at the edge of what passed for the Zon’s payload bay. It was about two-thirds the size of its American shuttle counterpart and much narrower. The hardest thing in getting the Zon launchworthy after the UA captured it was getting the two big doors of the payload bay to close and seal properly. Geraci’s engineers finally solved the problem, shaving a few inches off the end of each door. Once closed, no one connected with the Zon’s flight wanted anything to do with opening them up again. Hunter and Geraci had exited through a smaller bay just forward of the unusable larger one.

Both of them had zip guns—these were the small, gas-powered, dual-jet devices that looked like elaborate coat hangers. One squeeze of the trigger expelled a stream of gas which served to propel the user along in the vacuum of space. As far as technology went, these things were old back in the 1970s. But again, the Zon experience was one of settling and using whatever resources one had at hand.

Slowly, carefully, Hunter and Geraci began their short hop over to the tumbling Soyuz, now about 500 feet away. Hunter was glad when Geraci volunteered to take this trip with him. Like the others aboard the Zon, Geraci was reliable, quick, and fearless. The added bonus was that he was also an engineer—and engineers thought differently than other humans. Hunter knew his help in getting the Soyuz to stop tumbling would be invaluable.

Using information transmitted over their helmet radios by Elvis and JT, Hunter and Geraci glided over to the spinning Russian space capsule without incident. Hunter found himself fighting off the euphoria which had gripped him when he’d first emerged from the Zon. There was business to be done here—he couldn’t let anything interfere with the matter at hand, even if it was something as cool as walking in space.

They both pulled their tethers to a halt about 20 feet in front of the Soyuz. Now it was time for the real fun to begin. Geraci unhooked his lifeline and used his zip gun to get within a few meters of the Soyuz. With the NJ104 officer now so close to it, Hunter got his first good indication of the size of the space capsule. It was actually much larger than he’d thought, probably about the length of a city bus, but much thinner. It was painted lime green, with absolutely no streamlining. Up close, it looked like a Klingon warship.

Geraci pumped his zip gun again and now he was within arm’s reach of the spacecraft. Another shot of jet-gas and he began spinning almost at the same pitch as the ancient Russian spacecraft. Hunter could only shake his head in admiration for the engineer. It was the old “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” response to problem solving.

Geraci gave his zip gun one more short burst and was now spinning in synch with the Soyuz. He reached out with his left hand and grabbed hold of an antenna mount. Then his right toe snapped an equipment bay latch. In one quick motion the engineer lodged his left toe under a porthole frame and fired the zip gun once, twice, and then a third time.

Amazingly, the Soyuz stopped spinning.

But it was still a little wobbly. Hunter immediately jetted himself over to Geraci and rehooked the engineer’s tether. Then, together, they pulled the huge but weightless Soyuz toward them. The resulting jerk served to stabilize the spacecraft. Soon it was floating along as evenly as they were.

Each took a deep gulp from the oxygen supply. They’d corralled the old Soyuz easily enough. Now what?

“Let’s get inside,” Hunter radioed over to Geraci.

They found the main door latch after about a minute of looking. Geraci ran his finger along the seal and found that it was broken. The door into the capsule was not secured. Getting in would be no problem.

Hunter radioed their intentions back to the Zon; JT and Elvis, now sitting in the one-two seats, were on guard for more space mines. Ben and Cook were still acting as the ETA coordinators.

“Whatever you do, you’ve got to make it quick,” Ben told them. “My flowchart tells me we can expect another bomb to go off within the next twenty minutes.”

Sufficiently warned, Hunter and Geraci used pure muscle power to pry open the main hatch to the capsule. All the tumbling had bent it to the degree that its hinges no longer wanted to work. They were able to get it open wide enough for them to slip through. Taking a few moments to tie their tether lines to the nose of the capsule about six feet away, they guided themselves back to the open hatchway and prepared to go inside.

Geraci went first. It took him a few seconds to set himself correctly, but he quickly found some handholds and began climbing inside headfirst. He had to maneuver himself through the small airlock, then pass through a kind of safety tube in order to reach the crew cabin. This journey would take about two minutes in all, Hunter guessed. He began counting off the seconds as Geraci’s boots disappeared from view.

Just as he reached 1:59, his headphone exploded in static.

“Jeezus, I’m here,” he heard Geraci exclaim. “And wait ’til you see this…”

Now Hunter propelled himself inside the Soyuz, through the tiny airlock and into the safety tube. The interior looked like nothing less than the set to a science-fiction movie, and not a particularly expensive one, either.

It was very dark inside the airless space capsule. There were no interior lights or reflective material of any kind. A kind of greenish-blue powder covered everything. Hunter touched a panel with his glove and found the dust to be extremely sticky. Had smoke filled the capsule at one time, causing the odd coating? He didn’t know. What was obvious was how very cluttered it was inside; all kinds of space junk was hanging from the walls, making it very cramped and hard to maneuver around. Still, Hunter pressed on.

He could see Geraci’s boots suspended beneath the porthole which led up to the Soyuz flight compartment. Hunter inched his way up to them, feeling more uncomfortable with each passing second. Should an emergency arise—like a space mine going off nearby, or if the Soyuz began tumbling again—this was not the place to be. It was an odd sensation, being claustrophobic in outer space. But that’s exactly how Hunter felt.

It took him at least another minute to claw his way through the safety tube, but at last Hunter found himself climbing up into the flight compartment. That’s when he saw what had caused Geraci to call out.

Skeletons. There were three of them. They were still in their space suits, still strapped into their seats. But the faces behind the glass of the helmets were devoid of skin and muscles, leaving only skull and bones and teeth. They looked like they’d been picked clean by some kind of flesh-eating scavenger, but the more likely explanation was that a lack of oxygen inside the capsule had caused their skin to dry up and turn into minute specks of powder which were somehow dispersed in every direction around the capsule. This, Hunter was sure, explained the presence of the ghastly dust everywhere.

“Hell of a way to go,” Geraci said. “However they went, that is…”

Hunter could only agree. One man’s hands were grasping his throat; another’s were cemented to his air supply regulator. Clues, Hunter surmised, that a sudden, unexpected depressurization had caused the demise of the three nameless spacemen.

“But when?” Geraci asked, reading his mind.

It was a good question—and one that was difficult to answer. Soyuz capsules began service decades before. For all they knew, this incident could have taken place back in the sixties or seventies, a space flight that went bad and was covered up by the Russian government. Then again, these cosmonauts could have died the day before, or the day before that. The whole concept of time, aging, and decomposition did not apply in the same way out here in space. Whether this happened recently or back more than 30 years ago, the capsule and the stiffs would still look pretty much the same.

Hunter reached over and unstrapped one of the dead spacemen, allowing the weightless corpse to float free. Beneath his seat was a radio device which Hunter retrieved and studied. It looked to be something made during the 1930s, and not in any era of spaceflight. It was a tantalizing piece of equipment, but it gave them no clue as to when the spacemen had died—or under what circumstances.