Warp Speed (16 page)

My handhold on her slipped and I was flung away from her. The meter-long tether connecting us jerked taught. It felt like it cut me in half. The tether hung on my left leg somehow and caused me to be slung outward headfirst. I tried to unhook it, but the g-forces were too much for me to overcome. My head was on the outer end of the centrifugal force--my head felt like it would explode.

"My head is going to pop!" I couldn't stand the build up of pressure in my head much longer. The gees were approaching my limit.

"You can take it, Anson! Just hold on. The tanks will empty soon."

"They better! I'm starting to tunnel out." All I could see was a small white circle way off in front of me. Everything else was tunneling in around me. I tried to blink my eyes, shake my head, anything. Nothing helped.

Finally, the angular acceleration stopped. The rotation didn't. I was getting very dizzy and very nauseated. Tabitha fired her thrusters until she slammed into the ECC. She grabbed the handhold tight. This pulled me upright and into her back. I was still fairly useless, nearly unconscious. Tabitha expelled all of her thruster fuel over the next few minutes trying to stop the spin of the probe. She succeeded only in slowing the induced spin to a tolerable rotation. I was able to upright myself with her. I grabbed a handhold very tightly and panted near hyperventilation.

"Anson! Anson, look at me! Focus on your breathing. You have to slow down your breathing!" she ordered me over the UHF.

I closed my eyes and tried to relax and breathe normally.

"Focus!" she yelled.

"Okay," I puffed. "I . . . am . . . okay." Just talking was tough. For a while I thought I was seeing red, but that faded within a few moments.

Earth rolled by underneath us about every ten seconds or so. That was still considerable rotation, or so I thought.

"Anson. My thrusters are out. You have to stop the probe's rotation or at least slow it some more." I was too confused and disoriented to ask questions right away. I followed orders and fired my thrusters a few times. That stopped the probe's spin the rest of the way. We were now facing Earth constantly.

"What happened?" I asked her.

"Don't know. How much air do you have?"

I checked my Display and Controls Module (DCM). I ran through a few diagnostics on my suit. Tabitha was doing the same.

"I have three hours fifty-seven minutes. How about you?"

"Same," she said.

"What do we do? We're in space with no way to get home!"

"I ain't sure. First I think we should try communicating with someone. Although they'll be out of range." She was right. We both tried and failed to hail anybody. The UHF circuits on the suits only reach about ten kilometers or so. The Shuttle that relayed our signal to ground stations was gone. Earth was about three hundred kilometers below us and the ISS was about twelve thousand kilometers on the other side of the Earth.

"We're so screwed. Oh man, we are so
screwed
!"

"Anson, don't ever say that again! you hear me?" she scolded. "Think! There's a way out of this. We just have to find it."

"You're right. I hope." I was still trying to shake off the massive headache and the feeling of having been on that nasty roller coaster from a few minutes before.

"I don't hope. I know. That is the only way to see it in your mind. You know we will make it. Got it!" That last was more of an order than a question so I didn't answer.

I could imagine Bob's face while he was yelling at 'Becca, "Never give up!" That look of determination on his face was the same that I was seeing on Tabitha now. I realized that by God they were right! I wasn't giving up no matter how bad things got. Ever! I looked at Tabitha and realized that I knew we were going to make it somehow. I had a whole new fire burning in me. There was a way home. I just had to find it.

Now you might think, what about those poor folks on the Shuttle that just got destroyed? Where's the compassion for them? Weren't they your friends? I remember a decade or so ago how I felt horrible and cried while watching all those folks die when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed and I didn't even know any of them. Well that was different--I wasn't about to die myself then. At this point my main concern was survival--not compassion, anger, remorse, or any other emotion. Tabitha and I had all the time in the world to cry later--if we survived. My guess is that this is how soldiers must feel when they see their buddy beside them get blown away. They must know that they have to complete their mission or die, too. Then, later when they are safe, they cry. Tabitha is a soldier--I was certain that she was operating in pure survival mode. So, that was the only way that I could think--that I would think--until this was over and we were safe at home drinking a beer. Then I would cry for hours or days.

I touched the ring I'd tucked in my EMU in anticipation of popping the question during the EVA. "Tabitha, will you marry me?" I asked her.

"What!"

"Marry me! I said. "Marry me, Neil Anson Clemons."

"You are asking me
now
? We don't have time for this." She was frantic and looking furious.

"Tabitha," I began calmly and slowly. "I know that we're going to make it. And I want you to spend the rest of your life with me and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If we don't make it, and we will, I would rather make it with my fiance than my commander. Marry me!" I pleaded.

Tabitha took a long pause and a deep breath, if you can do that in an EMU. Then she nodded.

"Are you sure you aren't just asking me this because you're hysterical?"

"No! I was going to ask you earlier. I just never got the time. I have a ring right here in my pocket! I haven't let it out of my sight since we launched."

"Are you serious?" she asked.

"Hell, yes, I'm serious!" I was hurt a little.

"I will," she said quietly.

"Yes! I wish I could kiss you." I laughed. I'm not sure if I was hysterical, but I probably appeared to be.

After a few moments of silence, we set to work thinking about a plan to get us home. Communicating with those bright boys dirtside at NASA was our first priority.

We spent the next thirty minutes reconfiguring the datalink system for the probe to accept the UHF signals from the EMUs and then relay them over the digital data dump back to the HOSC in Huntsville. Had Al Rayburn and I not redesigned the spacecraft bus as a graphical interface this wouldn't have been possible. Any off-the-shelf spacecraft bus would've required actual rewiring that couldn't be done in an EMU. The dexterity in the gloves just wouldn't allow that. However, Al and I had the idea of making the entire spacecraft modular. Each wire connects to the generic connection point on the spacecraft bus. Then that connection can be allocated by the central computer system and some solid-state and mechanical relays. All the wires are the same but each has a different job as assigned by the computer. Al and I had taken the commercial bus we bought and spent a good deal of effort reverse engineering and reengineering it.

Tabitha and I finally reconfigured the data comm system to accept our UHF signal as data in. Then we retransmitted that signal through the Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier or "TWeeTA" system. The TWeeTA was designed to handle more data than had ever been attempted with a spacecraft. The warp field data would be vast when operational. Standard communications systems just wouldn't have been able to handle the data rates needed. So, Al, Jim, 'Becca, and I spent a good bit of time and money designing a newer more updated system. This communications system works a lot more like the Internet than a radio. That amount of data required a lot of power amplification. A TWeeTA is the only way to go about that. Tabitha and I used this to our advantage. Since the communications dish hadn't been deployed yet, we planned to use the omnidirectional antenna. We pumped plenty of power through the dipole so that the relay satellites could receive it with no problem.

But there was a problem: the datalink was just that, a datalink. Nobody would be expecting a voice signal over it. Jim would have to realize that the data he was receiving was a frequency modulated signal, then decode it to an audio circuit. Who knew how long that would take? The plus side is that with the Shuttle now destroyed, the folks dirtside wouldn't expect anybody to turn on the warp probe, either. The fact that it came on should surprise them, if they were watching their consoles properly. Also, while in orbit the probe was designed to communicate directly with the HOSC through the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System or TDRSS (pronounced "tea-dress") network. And we were in line-of-sight with one of those constantly. This meant that as soon as we turned on the transmitter, the HOSC would be receiving the data. We weren't worried about choking the bus of the relay satellites because an audio data file doesn't require much bandwidth.

"HOSC operations come in please. Is anybody there?" I began repeating.

Tabitha followed. "Come in Jim. Are you there?"

We kept talking so a constant audio file would be sent through Zephram, over TDRSS, to the HOSC, and hopefully to Jim.

"Tabitha, I'm going to survey the probe while we wait. There might be something on it we could use. Use for what I don't know."

I powered up the forward thrusters and moved slowly around the spacecraft. Where the large
thud
had taken place was on the ACS Fuel Tankage and Science Instrument section. We wouldn't be measuring the electromagnetic field strength and the gravimetric effects of the warp field today. We sure wouldn't be firing the attitude control thrusters either. The rest of the probe looked okay. I made my way back to the GUI panel and did a system diagnostic using its graphical user interface. The probe checked out, although the warp field coils hadn't been completely connected and the ECCs hadn't been brought online yet.

"HOSC, do you copy?" Tabitha repeated.

"Come on, Jim, where are you?" I looked at Tabitha's DCM.

"Give me the bad news, Anson."

"We still have about three hours of air left. That is plenty of time." I assured her. Plenty of time for what neither of us would admit. It takes days at best, usually weeks, to get a Shuttle ready for launch and about the same time for a Russian rocket. It takes even longer for a Chinese rocket. We discussed the possibility of the Crew Return Vehicle on the ISS.

"HOSC, are you there?" I said. "The CRV could never get to us in time. At full thrust I don't think it could make it to us in three hours."

"Maybe, Anson. Don't give up."

"Who's giving up? Jim, are you there?" I turned to her and approached. I hugged her suit as best I could and touched my faceplate to hers.

"I love you, Tabitha."

"Well, you may not live to regret that." She smiled.

Twenty or so minutes had passed and still no response from the HOSC. We were beginning to think nobody would find the signal.

"Jim, are you there? Huntsville, is anybody there? This is Anson Clemons--come in, Earth!" I was ready to try something else.

"Roger that, Dr. Clemons. This is Mission Control being patched through the HOSC. Is Colonel Ames with you? And what has happened?" It wasn't Jim's voice, but we didn't care. Tabitha took command.

"Mission Control, this is Shuttle Commander Tabitha Ames. The Shuttle Orbiter has been completely destroyed by some type of internal explosion. I repeat. The Shuttle Orbiter has been completely destroyed. The cause is unknown. Dr. Anson Clemons and I are the only survivors. We each have," she looked at her DCM readout, "roughly two hours and thirty-nine minutes of air left. Please advise on possible rescue scenario. The probe ACS thrusters are off-line and out of fuel and O2."

"Roger that, Commander. Understand that we are working on escape possibilities. We will advise you momentarily," Control replied.

"Roger, Houston."

The response came five minutes later--it seemed like forever.

"Colonel Ames, Tabitha, uh, we haven't got a working scenario that will save both of you. If you two have any suggestions, we're open for it down here." Hal Thompson was talking now. He was the boss down at Mission Control. I had met him a few times. He was shooting straight with us.

"Houston, this is Clemons. What do you mean by you can't save us
both
?" I had an idea what he meant, but I had to hear it.

"We don't have another Shuttle anywhere near ready for launch. We have called the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese have one on the launch pad but they won't be ready for launch for at least another seven hours or so. The Crew Return Vehicle is your only hope. It's already enroute to your location. The Hohmann Transfer required will take about four hours to reach you and another couple of minutes to match velocities with you. That's all we have right now. Sorry." Hal truly sounded sorry. I knew he was right. I had been running rough order of magnitude calculations in my head. One of us would have to survive long enough for the CRV to make it to us. Only one of us could with the combination of air from both suits--it would be Tabitha. At least she would make it. I told her it had to be her.

"No way! Anson, there's a better solution," Tabitha cried.

"Tabitha. It is the only way. You have a daughter back home. There's no choice to be made here." Heinlein always said (through his character Lazarus Long) that he wasn't afraid of death and that he knew it was part of the deal. I can't say that I'm that philosophical about it. Maybe I'm just not the superman he was. Death scares the living hell out of me. But I had to make sure Tabitha made it home alive. If I didn't do that, what kind of husband would I be?

"Stuff that, Anson. No way, period. End of that. You're the smart one--figure it out!"

"Houston, how long until I have to stop using my oxygen in order to give Tabitha time to wait for the CRV plus a few minutes of extra air?"

"Just a second on that, Anson," Hal replied solemnly.

"We'll see how long we have to work other solutions," I told Tabitha.

"Guys, this is Hal. Flight surgeon says that one of you would have to stop breathing in sixty-one minutes for the other to make it long enough for the CRV to get there."