Zero-G (3 page)

Tuck let Jess's head down, easing her chin to her chest. He pulled his hand away and grazed the dermal patch she wore. He stopped. “Wait one, Houston.”

He pulled closer and stared at the flesh-colored patch. A red line circled it and the skin beneath was swollen.

Moving to his right, Tuck performed the same finger-to-carotid-artery test on Russ Deaver. Russ was the senior payload specialist. Russ had a pulse, stronger than Jess's but not what it should be. Tuck didn't have to look long to see the red ring around the dermal patch.

“Houston, there's something going on with the SAS patch.” He described the skin anomaly.

There was a pause.
“Remove patch, Commander.
Right away.”

“Roger that. What about the others?”

“Yes, and bag and stow the patches.”

Tuck stripped the patches from the necks of Jess and Russ, retrieved one of the many plastic bags used for sealing food and bits of trash, and placed them inside a stowage compartment.

Next, heart stuttering, Tuck pushed himself to the mission station on the starboard side of the flight deck. Mission Specialist Jodie Law's arms floated before her, her long brown hair forming a halo. No matter how hard Tuck tried, he could find no pulse.

Tears trickled from his eyes, broke free of their meager grasp on his face, and floated in air as tiny spheres. Jodie was the youngest of the crew — just thirty-two. In Houston, her five-year-old daughter waited for her mommy. Same brown hair. Same blue eyes. Same infectious smile.

Tuck began to weep.

“Atlantis,
Houston.”

Tuck pulled himself into a ball. The motion moved him slowly forward and up toward the upper windows. Normally, Earth would fill the panes, but
Atlantis'
s unusual position and attitude only allowed a view of deep space, a blackness too profound to comprehend.

“Atlantis,
Houston. Talk to me, Tuck.”

Tuck didn't want to talk; didn't want to listen; didn't want to feel or think or be aware of anything outside the emotional vault he was building.

“Commander Tucker, respond.”

The spinning thoughts in Tuck's mind slammed together and crumbled. Vinny. Vincent Pistacchia Jr. Where was Vinny?

Adrenaline poured into his veins and Tuck snapped his head around so fast it caused his body to spin. He steadied himself.

“Moving to middeck, Houston. Stand by.” Tuck didn't wait for a response. The long headset line that allowed him to move around the flight deck when in orbit was too short to reach the deck below. It took only a second for Tuck to disconnect it and start for the inter-deck access hatch behind and to the port side of the commander's seat. Tuck pulled himself down the ladder headfirst like a man swimming to the bottom of a pool.

The middeck was the middle of
Atlantis
's three decks. One deck below that was the lower deck, a place for ductwork, wires, and the like. His concern was with flesh and blood, not insulation and instrumentation.

The compartment stood empty. The sight of the abandoned space made his already tripping heart stutter. He took several deep breaths to calm himself. Each action made the pain in his head rage. Against his will, his eyes crashed shut, lids tightening until tears squeezed out.

A few moments later, the agony diminished and he felt his jaw relax. “Pull yourself together, Tuck.” Sleepy. The profound weariness returned. This time he tortured the other cheek.

Sleep.

That was it.

He pushed across the open compartment making sure he didn't smash a shin on the latched table at the forward end of the small space. On the opposite side, the starboard side, were the sleep stations: three horizontal beds stacked so closely they made submarine bunks seem spacious. A vertical sleep space, essentially a sleeping bag tethered in place, was just aft of the bunks — it was empty.

Tuck launched himself to the sleeping area harder than necessary and it took some effort to keep from smashing his head into the metal structure. He pulled the first privacy screen to the side. Empty. He moved to the middle bunk. Also empty, as was the bottom.

“Think, Tuck. Think.”

The head? On the orbiter the bathroom bore the more noble moniker “Waste Management Compartment.” Astronauts had more colorful names for the small space where men and women did the business necessary of all biological entities.

“Be there, Vinny. Be taking a bio-break.” Tuck shoved off the bunk rack and moved like a missile to the WMC at the left rear of the middeck. He jerked the privacy curtain aside.

No Vinny.

Next to the privacy curtain stood the personal hygiene station, a place where crew could shave, clean up, and do other routine personal chores. A mirror hung on the surface. Tuck let his eyes drift to his reflection. He saw his sandy brown hair, strong jaw, trim face, and near empty hazel eyes.

Uncertain what to do, Tuck let himself drift above the middeck until he felt something hard against his back. He had drifted to the airlock hatch.

Something flickered in his mind. A brief image.

Then it came through the haze like a speeding freight train.

“No. Oh, no. Dear God, no, no, no.”

Tuck pushed forward and up the interdeck access, rapping his knee as he did so. The pain didn't matter. He didn't want to do what he did next, didn't want to see what he knew he would.

His next act required more courage than anything he had done before, including sitting atop tons of rocket fuel. He forced himself to look out the aft viewing windows, the ones that looked over the orbiter's cargo bay. The cargo doors were open as they always were once the Shuttle reached orbit. What ripped his breath away was the site of the RMS sticking into the darkness like one leg of a praying mantis. The Remote Manipulator System had been in use when whatever happened, happened. At the end of the fifty-foot, thousand-pound arm stood a human figure clad in a space suit.

“Vinny.” The name trickled from Tuck's lips.

Puzzle pieces of memory rained in Tuck's consciousness. Vinny was doing an extravehicular procedure. How long had he been out there?

Tuck keyed his mike. “Vinny. Do you read me, Vinny.”

No response.

“Houston. I can't raise Vinny. He's EVA.”

No response.

Tuck touched his mike, then realized the problem. He reeled in the loose end and plugged it into a com port. “Vinny, this is Tuck. Do you read?”

Nothing.

“Houston, I can't raise Vinny. He's EVA.”

“Tuck, we know about Vinny.”

A second passed before Tuck made the connection. Houston monitored vital signs of any astronaut who worked outside the safe confines of the orbiter. Vinny would have been wired up before donning his EVA suit. Once Tuck had stabilized the spinning Shuttle, communications were reestablished and FCC would be able to read Vinny's vitals.

“Why didn't you tell me, Rick? Why?”

“Tuck, your emotional state is fragile. We don't know
why, but you're the only conscious crewman. We need
you to be at your best and you're not. Telling you too soon
could have made matters worse.”

“How can it get worse?” His eyes ran to the video monitors that showed Vinny's lifeless body perched on the end of the RMS.

“How much do you remember, Tuck?”

“Not much, Rick. Not much. My brain is still clouded.”

“In addition to delivering supplies to the Internation
Space Station, part of your mission was a simple repair
on a DOD satellite. Of course, the Department of Defense
wants that part secret. Sometime during that mission,
Atlantis
began to spin. With the vehicle moving like it
was, we lost signal from the Ku-antenna. What data we
had indicated that RMS had been activated. We had no
consistent contact with you for three hours.”

“Three hours?”

“We couldn't maintain enough of a signal to override
from down here.”

“This can't be happening.”

“It is, Tuck, and we aren't out of the woods yet. There
are some things we want you to do.”

“I know what I need to do. I'm going out to get Vinny.”

“No, sir. No, sir, you are not. You're in no condition to
do that. You're the only one conscious, and you can't get
into an EVA suit without help.”

“I have to try, Rick. I can't leave him out there.”

“Listen to me, Tuck. You know you can't do that. Vinny
is dead. I know that's a hard and cold thing to say, but
you have to face that. Now we have a list of things for
you to do.”

“NASA always has lists.” The pain in his head flared. He groaned and waited for it to pass.

“You got that right, buddy.”

Rick had a lighter tone in his voice and Tuck recognized it for what it was — an attempt to lift his spirits and give him confidence. It failed.

“I'm going to walk you through this one step at a time,
pal. Just stay with me.”

Tuck pulled himself to the aft windows and stared at his friend Vinny. For a moment, he thought he saw the dead man wave.

TWO

R
ick Van Duren leaned back in his chair. If any of the other members of the flight control team at FCC in Houston were to look at him they would see a man unperturbed by the disaster taking place two hundred miles overhead. The only sign of nerves came from his rhythmic stroking of the mike boom that hovered above his jawline.

“How's he doing, Rick?” The voice came over the headset and without the customary, “CAPCOM, Flight.” Rick knew who was speaking. He also knew the question was nothing more than small talk leading to something more pressing.

“So far so good, Flight, all things considered. He has the Ku-antenna realigned for the present attitude. The giddiness seems to have gone, as has the melancholy. He's coming across more emotionally stable. I think removing the patch helped.”

“That's my take.”

Rick waited for Flight Director Dieter Huntz to get to what was really on his mind.

“You know him better than anyone, Rick. Can he fly
Atlantis
?”

Rick didn't respond at first. He and Tuck went back to their days at Annapolis and had served on the same aircraft carrier.

Dieter activated his mike again. “Give it to me straight, Rick. I don't want any of that astronaut machismo.”

Rick sighed. “No, Flight, he can't. In any other circumstance, I would put my life and that of my family in his hands, but at the moment, I wouldn't let him steer a riding lawn mower.”

“Flight, this is Surgeon. I concur. Commander Tuck's response time is at least 25 percent slower than normal.”

“Now that the patch is off, Surgeon, can we expect him to revive?”

“Flight, we don't even know for certain that the patch is the problem. It appears related, but I have no way of telling. I need to do a tox screen and I can't do that down here. We won't know anything until we get results from the test group.”

Rick thought of the three volunteer astronauts who donned the same patches. Some of the other flight surgeons were monitoring their health in hopes of determining the source of the problem. Rick would have volunteered himself, but he didn't want to leave his post.

“Our options are narrowing, gentlemen.” Dieter's voice sounded distant to Rick even though only a handful of steps separated them. “Ideally we'd have them dock with the space station, off-load the crew, and use what medical equipment we have there, but Tuck isn't in any kind of condition to make that happen. If he . . .”

Rick finished Dieter's sentence in his mind.
If he
messes up, Tuck kills not just himself and the rest of the
surviving crew but three men on the ISS.
The thought had been haunting Rick's mind.

“The longer they stay up there, the greater chance Jess and Russ will die too.” Bob Celtik groaned into his mike. “Removing the patches was the right thing to do, but we don't know if we removed them too late.”

“Russ and Jess need medical treatment beyond what they can get on the space station,” Rick said. “Flight, I suggest we go autoland.”

“The autoland system wasn't designed to bring the Shuttle back with crew on board. It was meant to allow us to land the vehicle after the crew was safe on the ISS.”

Rick knew this information well. He had been one of the astronaut advisors on the project. Since
Columbia
's tragic burnup over Texas in 2003, engineers developed new safety protocols in the event of damage to the Shuttle during launch. One of the first things a crew did once in orbit was to use the RMS arm to examine the heat tiles and wings. If the craft had sustained life-threatening damage, then the crew would dock with the International Space Station, disembark, and let FCC land it empty of the crew. The ISS, depending on the number of astronauts on the station and on the orbiter, could sustain them for eighty to one hundred ten days. NASA would send another Shuttle to bring them home.

A complete autolanding had never been done. Much of a Shuttle's return was automated, handled by a computer, but certain functions like deploying air sensors that aided the computer in its flight, lowering the landing gear, and deploying the drag chute required a human on board. Recent modifications allowed NASA to handle even those tasks.

Another problem plagued the idea of autolanding with a crew on board: tests had shown that the computers tended to bring the craft in too fast, and too fast meant possible tire failure. It would be a disaster to lose an empty Shuttle that way; it was beyond tragic to lose a crew.

“Flight, I don't think we're playing this hand; it's playing us. No matter what decision we make it will be second-guessed.”

“
We
don't make this decision, Rick,
I
do.”