Orbital Decay (44 page)

It was exactly at 0750 that I realized there
was
a fatal flaw in our plan. But by that time, there was nothing I could do about it. But that time I knew something had gone wrong. If the plan had worked, by now I should have received a signal from Lowenstein on the command deck, informing me that Jack had managed to take over the Ear module and was transmitting to Olympus, enabling me to downlink the virus program. With only ten minutes left until their deadline, though, I intuitively felt that
something
must have gone wrong.

However—and here was the fatal flaw—there was nothing I could do, because everything depended upon them transmitting to me.
I could not transmit to them
, nor could Joni. Jack had to select a particular frequency from the Ear module, one which he deduced was not presently being monitored. There were hundreds of frequencies from which to choose, but Joni had to get the right one, the only one, before we could coestablish the computer downlink to Freedom. A particular frequency, to be decided upon at the last minute, before…

“Hell with it,” I murmured to myself, reaching for the intercom phone on my console. My nervousness was such that I was talking out loud. “She’s just going to have to scan them all, find the one Jack’s using, that’s all.” I picked up the receiver and began to punch in the three-digit number for Command/Communications. “She’s just going to have to take some responsibility, y’know, do a little bit of hard work here….”

Suddenly a hand reached past mine, and an outstretched finger pushed the intercom’s disconnect button. I yelped, dropping the receiver in my lap and jerking back in my seat as I looked up and saw who it was that had managed to sneak into the compartment unnoticed.

Phil Bigthorn. The sequoia that walked like a man. The Navajo security chief was wearing his Skycorp Security uniform shirt and had his taser holstered to his turquoise-studded leather belt. That meant bad news; Bigthorn only wore that outfit when he was out on business. He was also smiling, which really meant bad tidings; Mr. Big only smiled when he was preparing to rip your heart out and hand it to you.

“Hi, Phil,” I said brightly. I thought I did pretty well to get that out without much stammering. If I was lucky, maybe I could bluff my way through this. “What’s the buzz?”

Phil only grunted and stepped back a pace, letting his arms drop to his sides. I noticed that his right hand was close to the handle of his taser. For a few moments he stood there silently, studying me while I felt cold beads of sweat sliding down from my armpits.

“I’ve been standing behind you for a couple of minutes,” he said at last, his voice a perfect monotone. “Sounds like you’re having trouble hearing from Jack. I’m looking for Jack, too. Do you know where he is?”

“Jack?” My own voice hit the high end of the scale. “Don’t know who you’re… Oh! Jack! Don’t know where he is…” I shook my head vigorously, and stared at the blank screen of my computer. I could see Mr. Big’s humorless smile reflected in it. “No, no,” I said, trying to behave appropriately befuddled, like some simple, absent-minded computer programmer who didn’t know shit unless it was stored on a diskette. “Why, is there something wrong?”

Bigthorn nodded once, slowly. The smile had disappeared completely from his face, leaving an expression as stolid and unforgiving as the Navajo reservation desert. “Command’s received an emergency signal from Freedom Station,” he said. “It sounds as if three persons from Skycan got down there somehow and are trying to do something. So you don’t know where Jack is? Virgin Bruce, or Popeye?”

I shook my head. He nodded toward the intercom and the receiver lying in my lap. “I saw you punch in the number for Communications,” he said in the same droll tone. “Were you calling Joni about something?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I was. Maybe I wanted to ask her for a date? Whose business is it?”

That was probably a mistake. Mr. Big stared at me for a moment longer. Perhaps he had already put all the pieces together even before he had soundlessly crept through the connecting hatch from Module 42 and had listened to me talking to myself. But he just sighed, and without taking his dark, watchful eyes off me he reached with his left hand to his belt and unsnapped his pair of chrome-plated handcuffs. Like the uniform shirt and the taser, the handcuffs only appeared when he was out on business.

“What’s the charge?” I snapped.

He just glowered at me and lifted his chin a little to motion me to lift my wrists. Up here, he didn’t need to read me the Miranda. I knew it, and he knew it. The jig was up.

Something had
seriously
gone wrong on Freedom Station.

“Gentlemen,” Hamilton said, bending over the computer terminal with a headset cupping his right ear, “I do believe we are screwed.”

“Yeah, no shit!” Virgin Bruce yelled back. He was still holding the back of his head where it had been kicked into the hatch cover. “Do you know what’s happening? The tunnel…”

“The tunnel to the docking chamber has been blocked,” Hamilton finished, punching into another frequency code. “We can’t get to the airlock where the
Willy Ley
’s docking. That, plus we can’t raise Skycan. I’m trying all the channels Joni told me she would monitor and I’m getting nothing.”

“Oh, for Christ’s
sakes
!” Bruce shouted in spite of the throbbing in his head. “You’ve snafued the whole goddamn thing, you know that? The whole fucking thing is…”

“
Will you shut your mouth
!” Jack yelled. Virgin Bruce quailed and Popeye looked up from the console over which he was bending. It was the first time either of them had heard Hamilton raise his voice. Hamilton’s head snapped toward Popeye, who was monitoring communications originating from Freedom. “What’s going on there?”

Popeye stared back at him for a moment. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied and trying to figure a way out of their predicament, he would have been tempted to give Hamilton a chop in the jaw, on general principles if nothing else. “They’re talking to Skycan,” he said. “It’s mostly coded, but it’s an emergency message. You can guess what about. I’ve also picked up some uncoded transmissions to other parts of the station. It sounds like they’re trying to stay off the intercom to reduce the chance of us hearing them. They’re isolating this part of the station and getting ready to undog that hatch and send men in.”

“What about
Willy Ley
?”

“It’s reached orbit and is on course for rendezvous. They’ve informed the shuttle that there’s an emergency aboard station but they’re telling your friend to come in.” He blinked. “ETA in about nine minutes. I guess by then it won’t matter much.”

It had been an ingenious plan. Hamilton told himself that to keep from completely losing his mind over how easily it had fallen apart—gone snafu, to paraphrase Virgin Bruce—although Jack still refused to blame himself. Although he hadn’t realized it himself at the time, Hamilton had been working on the plan even before he had boarded the
Willy Ley
months ago for his trip up to Skycan. His meeting and resultant friendship with Lisa Barnhart—from the time they had encountered each other at the Cape, through weeks of correspondence and a couple of long-distance phone calls—had resulted in her agreeing, albeit reluctantly, to help in carrying out the scheme. Lisa had deliberately been kept in the dark about some of the details, and she knew little about the exact nature of the Big Ear, but she had been willing to take on three stowaways from Freedom Station when she made her weekly milk run.

Hamilton had blessed her willingness—almost blind willingness, considering that she knew so little and had so much to risk—but he also understood the stipulation she had placed on the agreement. “
I can’t get caught
,” she had written in the notes she had stuck in the sweatband of the Fat Boy’s Barbecue cap she had shipped him. “
Be there or get left behind—5 minutes
!
or I cut you off and I cut loose. Sorry
.”

He shook his head, stabbed in another code at random—he had already tried that one a dozen times—and listened to another shift in static pitch. Where the hell was Joni? What had happened to Sam? Good old
Willy Ley
, his friend in which he had spent a couple of terrifying hours throwing up. The shuttle would only dock for a short while, so that the station’s orbital trajectory could carry the shuttle to a precoordinated point above Earth for its maximum-efficiency re-entry window. If all had worked well, by now they would be receiving Sam’s virus program and feeding it into the Ear computer, and be getting ready to head back to their entry point on Freedom to intercept
Willy Ley.
While the station’s Canadarm operator would be loading the payload canister into the shuttle’s open cargo bay, they would squeeze through the docking tunnel in the bay’s forward end and climb into
Ley
’s middeck passenger section. That part would take less than five minutes. It had to—because it took only a few minutes more than that before the station would swing into the right orbital bearing for
Ley
’s separation. Any delays, Lisa had explained, would cause someone to ask questions. Freedom traffic control was a tight operation.

“There’s no way,” he murmured. Even in weightlessness, he felt the weight of everything he had attempted settle across his shoulders. “We can’t get there from here. Not before they get us. We’re screwed.”

“You said that already!” Virgin Bruce yelled. “C’mon! You’re the goddamn genius! Get us out of here!”

Hamilton, feeling drained, stood up from the console in his stirrups, gazed at Bruce with weary eyes, and let his hands rise of their own volition. “You know the score,” he said quietly. “What’s your idea?”

“What’s… what are you saying, man?”

“I’m out of ideas,” Jack said urgently. “This whole scam depended upon a number of variables working out. I fucked up. I guessed wrong. It’s going kaput. In a couple of minutes we’re screwed. No way to…” He shook his head, ending his rambling apology. “If you’ve got a way out, let’s hear it. Or you, Popeye. Otherwise, we’re dog food.”

“Dog food.” Virgin Bruce let the word roll off his tongue and the syllables dropped into a whisper, the voice of someone suddenly made aware of inevitable and impending defeat. “Fuck. You’re right. We’re dog food.” He suddenly smiled, and chuckled dryly. “Gainesburgers,” he mumbled.

Hamilton found himself smiling, and as he let out a short, involuntary laugh, he heard that laugh echoed by Popeye Hooker.

The beamjack, grinning, shook his head in obvious disbelief. “This is really too much,” he said. “You got us into this situation with the idea that everything would work out exactly as you planned, like some perfect bank robbery, and now that the chips are down you’re looking to us to bail you out. I swear, Jack, I’d strangle you if I thought we had the time.”

Hamilton shrugged. “We’ve got the time. We can’t get to the airlock to escape, we can’t get through to Skycan…” He threw up his hands. “We’re trapped. Unless you’ve got some great idea to get us out of this mess, you might as well go ahead and strangle me. I deserve it.”

Popeye studied him. “You mean that, don’t you?” he said wonderingly. “You got us into this because of your Globe Watch gang’s intelligence reports, lied to everyone about your conversation with that guy…”

“Whoa! Hold on a minute,” Virgin Bruce interrupted. His dark eyes flashed from one man to the next. “What are you talking about, lying to…?”

Popeye shook his head and waved him off. “Never mind, Bruce. It would take too long to explain. Let’s just say that everything isn’t as it seems.” He looked back at Hamilton. “I’ll make you a deal, Jack. I know a way to get out of this mess, and I’ll let you in on it… if you can tell me one thing.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why was all this worth it?” Hooker said. “Why was it worth putting him, me, and all those other poor suckers into this situation? Why is it worth my risking my life to get you out of this jam?”

Hamilton’s eyes dropped to the compartment floor. He suddenly felt small and tainted, like a kid caught shoplifting or a married man caught by his spouse in an indiscreet act with another woman. He was nailed; he could tell no more lies.

“I…” He stopped.

“
Why
?” Popeye roared, and both men flinched. “
What goddamn good has this done
!”

“We
tried
, goddammit!” Jack howled back. “We
tried
to make a difference! Shit, that might not be good enough, but we made the fucking
effort
!” He ripped his headset off and, in what even he realized in part of his mind was a childish tantrum, flung it at Hooker. “That’s why we did this, you son of a bitch!”

“We tried and we blew it!” Hooker yelled back, swatting Hamilton’s headset away with the palm of his hand. “You asshole, we were doomed from the
start
! What was the good of making the effort?”

Hamilton’s face was hot, and every nerve in his body screamed for him to throw himself at this goddamned redneck shrimp fisher from Florida. “You’ve got some fuckin’ nerve, you geek!” he shouted. “You’ve been lying around for months in your bunk, bothered about something too dark to tell anyone about! You’ve been a basket case, pal! You couldn’t give a crap about anyone until this happened, and now you’ve got the…
Jesus
, you’ve got the nerve to ask why we’ve made the
effort
! You’ve got to ask that? Holy shit, pal, you’ve got it wrong! The effort is
everything
!”

Popeye had a sudden sensation. He couldn’t have described it if he had been asked, but it was like flipping on a light switch in a dark, familiar room; the light flashes for a millisecond, enough time for the eyes to react, then the filament pops in a silent, microscopic explosion that surges through your nerves as the room plunges into darkness. But this time, there was no…

A gold band
,
shaped for a lady’s finger
,
splashing into blue crystal water
,
twisting
,
falling
,
going
,
gone
…

This time there was no darkness.

“All right,” he said in a calm voice. “Okay.” He looked up into Hamilton’s hate-filled face—he had never seen Jack like this before—and then at Virgin Bruce, and was doubly surprised to see the beamjack looking frightened. “Okay,” he repeated, this time for his own benefit.