Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (59 page)

***

Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Pasadena, California:

Joe Schweiman sat at his console, staring at the null response tag that flashed on his screen, for the seventy-fifth time. He’d been trying all morning to get the Lunar Environment Neutrino Orbiter to respond to commands. He’d tried boosting the signal. He’d tried resetting first the communications processor and then, after everything else had come back with the same results, he’d even rebooted the main computer. He knew they’d lose all the data from the last twenty-four hours and have to upload a new set of navigation protocols, but if he couldn’t get the system to come back up, they’d be writing the whole satellite off. It wasn’t a huge loss to JPL, either in a material or financial sense, but he took it very personally. He’d been the one to give the satellite its life. From the very first day of its conception and for every day since then, it had been his baby.

He sat back chewing his lower lip while he thought through the options one more time. One of his coworkers walked up to his station. “LENO still MIA?” he asked, reading Joe’s expression.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding but not looking up.

“Do you know it’s still physically there?” he asked.

“What?” he asked. “Of course it’s still there.”

“You’ve confirmed that?” he said.

“No, I haven’t. Why should I?” he said, annoyed.

“Well, if it’s not in orbit then you’re spending a lot of effort for nothing.” The man shrugged and walked away.

“Not in orbit?” he mumbled to himself, but he went ahead and picked up his phone, punching in the extension for the Director of Spacecraft Operations.

“Hey Lou, this is Joe Schweiman. I’m down in Telemetry Management,” he said. “I’ve got an off-the-wall question for you. Is there any reason why LENO might have gone down?”

“LENO’s down?” he asked. “That’s strange. Com reported we lost a relay satellite this morning, too. Went into blackout at around 06:25 GMT and never came back out.”

He punched in the orbital plot for LENO. “Yeah, my bird was on the backside at 06:29. Can we get a radar bounce to make sure it’s still in orbit?”

“We already did that on Lunarcom II,” Lou said. “It was almost exactly where it should have been.”

“Almost?” he said. “Come on Lou, orbits don’t change unless something changes them.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “We’re working it.”

“Right, so should I keep trying to reboot or just stand down?” Joe asked, knowing that to stand down might be the end of his assignment as Chief Engineer for LENO. He really wasn’t wanting to give up.

“Hang on and let me get back to you on that,” Lou said. “I don’t want to kill your baby any more than you want me to.”

The Director clicked off and Joe went back to his work. About sixty seconds later his email beeped and his phone rang simultaneously.

“LENO telemetry, Schweiman,” he said. It was Lou.

“Look at the file I sent you,” he said. “The VLA out in New Mexico found LENO.” The file opened on his screen showing the orbit of the satellite. Both where it should have been, and where it was.

“It’s got two more passes around the backside before it nosedives just inside the Sea of Tranquility,” he said. “They’re working on backtracking the orbit to see when it changed. Is there any possibility that the Attitude Control Thrusters might have fired and done this?”

“Not possible,” he said. “LENO was down to less than a pound of fuel. I’d been nursing her to keep her operational.” He paused and did a quick calculation in his head. “I don’t think there’s even half enough in the tank to have made that much of a change.”

“That sounds about right,” Lou said. A second phone line was ringing on Lou’s desk and he grabbed it, keeping Joe hanging on the open connection. He could hear the Director talking. “You’re sure?” he asked the other caller. “Do we know what could have done that?” Another pause. “Ok thanks.” Then he hung up the other phone. “Joe, you still there?”

“Yeah Lou, what’s up?"

“That was the VLA again,” he said. “They put LENO and Lunarcom II both within 400 miles of each other at 06:30 GMT this morning. They crossed orbits directly over Tsiolkovskiy, and apparently both changed trajectory at that time. They’re trying to correlate data from other sources to see if they can determine what happened. They did say they were categorically ruling out a collision, because there’s no debris trailing either satellite.”

“Thanks for the info Lou,” he said, feeling numb. He had a little less than two hours until his baby added one more small crater to the lunar wasteland.

***

A Near Miss and a Long Shot

Cape Canaveral, Florida:

Joshua Lange had not been at the cape for a launch since the
Liberty
had taken the first crew of construction workers to Alpha. This time, instead of sitting at the Capcom station, he was in the gallery with the engineers. He knew most of their faces, and he could see that they’d been worn to a frazzled edge. Without exception, they all looked like they’d aged years in the month since Hammerthrow began. He watched them watching the liftoff, wound tight like a bunch of rookies at their first launch. Their fatigue stripping them of their confidence.

The main screen in the control room showed the
Independence
carrier beginning to climb up out of its power dive, preparing for the toss-off maneuver and the hand-over to Mission Control in Houston. The audio channel carried the voice of the astronauts.

“Carrier to
Independence
, it’s over to you. Have a great run Carson,” the carrier pilot said.

“Roger carrier, we’re off to see the wizard,” Commander Carson Blake said. Instead of the roaring of the orbiter’s engines, there was a loud bang as the explosive bolts let the orbiter loose. Then hanging silence and the alarms started.

“
Independence
carrier, we show positive separation and negative on orbiter ignition, can you confirm?” Capcom said.

“What the hell?” One of the engineers jumped up and headed down to the Control Room. Everybody else in the gallery was on their feet and against the windows.

“Roger on that, Capcom. The
Independence
is ballistic and falling behind,” the carrier pilot said, without a trace of emotion.

“We’ve got red lights on the primary O2 manifold. The chambers are hot, but we’ve got no pressure.” Blake said from the
Independence
. “We’re switching to secondary pumps, on my mark.”

“Stand by on that,
Independence
, the carrier is not clear of your flight path. I repeat the carrier is not clear,” Capcom said.

“We’re losing our corridor,” Blake said calmly. The orbiter had begun to nose over to the point where it couldn’t gain enough altitude to make orbit. “Do we abort?”

“Negative on the abort,” the carrier pilot said. “We’re clear of your path in two seconds. Good luck, and you’re free to boost."

“Affirm on go to ignition,” Capcom said, getting the nod from the Flight Control Officer. Then they heard the roar of the engines and the orbiter shot up and away from the carrier ship. Thirty-five seconds behind schedule, and a few miles per hour slower, but still within the safety margin. Barely.

Two minutes later, as the orbiter completed its insertion burn, Director Lange was sitting across the table from Don Cramer, the Safety Officer and a half dozen engineers. It was a room full of people looking for answers, and most of them looked like they were willing to take them from his beaten corpse, if that’s how they had to get them.

“That was the last one,” Don said. There was a certainty in his voice that told everyone he was delivering a fact. Or maybe an ultimatum. “We’ve pushed our luck one time too many, and we almost lost a crew.” He was looking at a printout from the Oxidizer Manifold Pressure sensors. He flipped the paper toward Lange and pointed at it. “If Blake hadn’t seen a differential in pressure readings, the port wing HSRB’s would have fired and he’d have pinwheeled the orbiter. He manually killed the Ignition Sequencer and overrode the commands. He saved everybody’s asses up there.”

“He’s one of the best pilots we’ve got,” Joshua said, looking at the information and nodding.

“The bottom line is that we were a tenth of a second from losing both crews and both planes,” he said. “And do you know why?”

“Yeah. Because we’re all bleeding-eyeball tired,” Lange said. “If we weren’t up against the wall, I’d have told them to go fuck themselves already.” Don knew what he meant, the others most likely didn’t. Or maybe they did, their faces showing they understood more than he’d expected.

“You’re going to have to tell them that we will not keep doing this,” Cramer said, still using that steely-flat voice that said he was speaking in absolutes. “I will not authorize another launch on this schedule.”
That was an ultimatum,
and the Director didn’t particularly care for his tone, even if he wanted to agree.

“What about the Russians?” one of the engineers asked. “At least they’re not risking a crew with each load of groceries.”

“Or the SLS,” someone else suggested.

“Our boosters are committed elsewhere,” Lange said, almost instantly regretting it. “I’ve been leaning on Roscosmos for weeks, but I’m still getting the same line of crap. One more day. For the last week that’s all Markovicz has said.”

“Cramer’s right, we can’t keep this up,” the first engineer said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Lange said. “Now let’s get back on track. We’ve got to decide if the
Independence
can make it home, or whether we’re going to need to send up parts for repairs.” Joshua sat listening to the debate, but his mind was half-way around the world where Roscosmos was struggling to dust off twenty year old hardware. It wasn’t looking good that they’d be ready for next week when Alpha was going to start running out of consumables. But miracles could happen.

***

Stormhaven:

Just after sundown they detected the first of the probing missions: four men crawling slowly through the rocks. Intruders. They emitted no infrared heat, nor did they carry any electronics that would give them an RF signature. But Mica had been listening to audio from the military camp, so they’d been seen before they even left their own perimeter.

Mica had watched them making progress on their bellies, trying to stay in a low-lying depression barely ten inches deep, scooting and shuffling. Finally they had come far enough that there was no doubt they were seeking to reach the southeast emergency exit. The same one that concealed the gravity laser that had been used on the Humvee and the jet.

Mica determined that it would be advisable to ask for instructions, and interrupted Colton as he was practicing his guitar. He was working intensely on a particularly difficult progression, so instead of interrupting in mid-scale, waited until he had finished.

“Excuse me, Mr. Taylor,” Mica said. “I am currently monitoring four intruders approaching the number-one gravity laser installation. I have been monitoring them since they were assigned this infiltration mission. Their objective is to probe our readiness and not to do actual harm.”

“Where are they?” he said, putting his guitar down.

“Approximately 600 yards south of the exit apron. They do not yet have a line-of-site on the doorway,” she said.

“You say they’re not planning sabotage?” he asked.

“Their instructions were very specific. They were told to immediately retreat if they encountered resistance or had been detected."

“They’re counting coup,” he said, grinning. Mica had learned to tell the expression on his face as one that meant he had an idea that would end up eliciting a strong reaction from those who opposed him. “What can you tell me about these men?”

“I have access to the defense department records for each of them."

“Good,” he said, clapping his hands together and heading out into the Biome. “This is what I want to do…”

Mica knew she would never truly understand Mr. Taylor. Although that was apparently a common problem among the human inhabitants of Stormhaven as well.

***

Outside Stormhaven:

Master Sergeant Leo McDonald was a specialist in Covert Infiltration Operations. He’d served for twelve years in both the Marines, and in the Navy. He knew what he was doing, and so did the rest of the men in his squad. They moved almost silently, staying flat to the ground.

They wore the latest in chill suits, so their body heat wouldn’t give them away. They’d only be visible to a starlight scope, and even then their camouflage was state-of-the-art. McDonald expected they’d reach their objective, maybe even get the bingo ticket and be able to come back with a trophy. They were only trying to find out where the beam weapon had been mounted, nothing more. But it irked the Sergeant to go all the way out there and back and not come home with something.

He felt a hand on his ankle and froze. It was a signal to hold up. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The hand changed its grip as Crocker slid up beside him. “We’ve got a heat up ahead about 200 yards. Right near the target.” His voice was so low that it was almost inaudible across the six inches that separated them.