Orbital Decay (40 page)

Although Olympus Station had in recent years taken away much of the attention—with its far larger crew capacity, one-third g capability and Project Franklin—Freedom remained as proof that space was a viable habitat for humanity, that the high frontier could be conquered by private industry and the public sector working in concert for the betterment of all people. Especially those who had purchased the right stock at the right time. Who could argue with success?

“SHIT,” VIRGIN BRUCE SAID FROM
somewhere in the darkness. “My legs are getting cramped.”

“They shouldn’t be,” Jack Hamilton said over the comlink. “Your muscles shouldn’t be tight in zero g. How many times have you been in your pod? That thing’s even tighter than this.”

“Ah, go throw up,” Bruce muttered, “then tell me about zero g”

“Don’t even mention that,” Popeye Hooker said sharply. “If he gets sick, there’s nothing he can do about it.” In a softer voice he added, “How’re you doing there, Jack?”

“I’m okay. I’m over it now. Jesus.”

Popeye checked the chronometer on the heads-up display inside his helmet. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. We should be decelerating any minute now.”

“That’s right,” Virgin Bruce said. “Keep reminding us. God damn, can’t we loosen these straps any?”

“No, don’t do that,” Popeye said. “The shift in inertia might throw the guidance computer off, and I don’t want to spend another half an hour in this thing waiting for a recovery crew to retrieve us.”

“Yeah,” Hamilton said. “I second the motion.”

“You mean the lack of it.”

The three men laughed. After a moment the laughter died out, and it was quiet over their radio link once again. “Anyone got any more stupid stories to tell?” Jack asked.

“
Oh
,
fuck
!” Virgin Bruce suddenly snarled.

“What’s wrong?” Popeye snapped.

“I just farted,” Bruce said in disgust. “Oh, geeze…”

“That’s what you get for eating,” Hamilton said after allowing himself an evil chuckle. “And for wishing Star Whoops on me.”

Popeye and Jack laughed again, and then the laughter died out. “You want to recharge your suit air again?” Hamilton asked. “It might help a little.”

“Naw. I’m at max pressure already. I’m just going to have to live with it.”

More silence in the darkness. Hamilton sighed after a little while. “Once I was on a camping trip in the White Mountains,” he began, “and we heard this bear rooting through the brush outside our tent…”

“Is this your stupid story?” Virgin Bruce asked.

“This is my stupid story. Anyway…”

Suddenly they all felt a slight but discernible
thump.
“There go the RCR’s,” Popeye said. “Okay, gang, we’re going in.”

The cargo OTV from Olympus fell a little short of its expected rendezvous point with Freedom’s orbit, which meant that the station’s tug had to go out a little farther than expected in order to retrieve it and bring it in. Neither the space traffic controller at Freedom nor the docking crew thought much of it; even with no payload to be calculated into the equation, the trajectory of a returning OTV was sometimes off by a couple of degrees in either direction. The shift controller decided not to even bother logging the incident, it was that minor.

Thus, it took a few extra minutes for the pod to tow the OTV to Freedom, where a spacesuited crew member in an MMU latched onto the cylinder with his grappler and gently wrestled the thing down through the open hatch of the Number Three service hangar and onto its cradle. The crew member glided up and over the little spacecraft to its bow and secured its docking adapter to that of the hangar’s, making sure the hatches had an airtight fit. Then he jetted out of the hangar and let the command module personnel close the garage doors behind him.

It was another ten minutes after that, at 0710, when another crew member, whose name was Magic Johnson Jones and who was still pissed off that his father, an L.A. Lakers fan, had given him such a silly-ass name when he had been born, undogged a hatch and schlepped his weary ass down the access tunnel to garage Number Three. Jones—who preferred the nickname Joe, and screw what anyone said—expected the chore of checking in the just-arrived OTV to be the last thing he had to do on his shift before he went back to his berth and tucked himself into his sleeping bag for six hours of sleep.

He floated up the tunnel, stopped in front of Number Three and pressed the switch on the wall beside the hatch which would pressurize the empty OTV. As he watched the digital indicator which would tell him when the robot spacecraft’s cargo bay was fully pressurized, Jones felt the stress of the past week settle over him. Normally his routine as a spacecraft maintenance engineer—NASA’s longwinded jargon for what was essentially gofer work—was light, but ever since the new Skycorp module had been attached to the station, he had found himself increasingly involved with putting it on-line. The weirdest part was that he still didn’t know exactly what the module’s function was, only that it was jammed with electronic equipment. When the team which was to oversee Module 13’s operations had arrived by shuttle a couple of days ago, Jones had tried to ask about the module’s purpose. He had been rebuffed by the team’s leader, a skinny guy named Dobbs, who was not much older than Jones.

“It’s an electronics system,” Dobbs had said, as if that answered everything. Jones had wanted to say, Hey, you think because I’m Haitian I’m stupid or something? What he said instead was, “Oh, what kind of electronics?” And Dobbs had replied, “Very sophisticated electronics. If I explained, I doubt you’d understand,” and Jones had wanted to punch the wimp in the teeth.

“So screw it,” Jones said to himself as he recalled the incident. Punching out someone important like that would only get him shipped back to Earth. He hadn’t struggled down there for years for the chance to go to work in space just to blow it on something stupid like that. No way he was going to return to L.A. now; he was still working on getting transferred to Olympus Station, where the bucks and the action were.

Magic J. Jones saw that the pressurization of the OTV was complete, and was about to head back down the tunnel to his quarters in Module 3 when he thought he heard a sound coming from the other side of the hatch, as if something were shifting inside the OTV. He stopped and listened, but heard nothing more. He shrugged and was about to write it off as an auditory illusion brought on by overwork, when he looked down and saw that the locking wheel was turning counterclockwise all by itself.

Now what the hell was
this
? Fascinated, he bent forward and watched the wheel as it slowly turned until there was the loud
click
of the bolts sliding back. It was something he had seen several times when he had been at the service hangars to assist arriving OTV’s whose impatient crews had not waited for someone to unlock the hatch for them. But this OTV was an unmanned cargo craft. There was no way to unlock the hatch from the inside unless…

The hatch was pushed open by an arm encased in a spacesuit sleeve and gauntlet, and Jones instinctively pulled back. “Hey! Yo!” he shouted, suddenly feeling scared. “What the hell is going on here, man! Who…?”

A helmet was flung straight out of the hatch, hitting Jones in the stomach, even as he reflexively reached up to catch it. He grunted and doubled up over the helmet, his back bouncing off the tunnel wall behind him. Through a wave of pain and surprise he glimpsed a man in a spacesuit, sans helmet, launching himself through the hatch… then, in the next instant, the guy’s thick, gloved hand grabbed Jones’ neck and rammed his head back against the metal wall of the tunnel. The impact made him see tiny pinprick explosions in front of his eyes; he would have gasped, but the hand was tight against his throat.

Through mixed pain, confusion, and outright fear, Jones dimly perceived that others were climbing out of the OTV behind the man who had attacked him. “Works every time,” the man holding him by the neck said in a low voice. Jones squinted at him, saw a gaunt face rimmed with a beard, then dark eyes which turned to stare balefully into his own.

“Okay, buddy, one chance,” the intruder growled. “Where’s the Ear?”

“What?” Jones didn’t know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, his attacker didn’t buy that excuse. The hand tightened around his throat.

“I said to you, where’s the Ear? Where’s it located?”

“I don’t… what are you talking about?” Jones gasped.

He shrank back as the man with the beard pulled a clenched fist back to hammer his head into the curving tunnel wall. Then one of the others behind him—there were two, he now realized—said quickly, “Easy on him, Bruce.” This one, who had also removed his helmet, had long blond hair. He said to Jones, “There’s a new module here on the station. Came in last week. Where is it?”

Jones’ mind was racing. They could be terrorists. PLO, or IRA, or American Christian Army, or one of any number of left- or right-wing extremist groups. But the OTV hadn’t come up from Earth; it had come from Olympus, and as far as anyone knew, there weren’t any terrorist cells on that place, so how could…? Never mind, never mind. The point was that he now knew what they were searching for, so should he tell them where it was? If he told them, would it later come back to him that he had released that information? Oh, Christ, he didn’t want to go back to L.A….

“He knows,” the guy with the beard said. “Okay, bub, one more chance. Tell us where it is, or I’m taking you to the nearest airlock and pitching your ass out. One, two, three…”

Oh, the hell with all this! “Module 13!” Jones would have yelled, but with the hand around his throat, all he could produce was a weak rasp. “Thirteen! Tunnel One, all the way to the end!” He pointed down the way he had come, where their access tunnel, Number Two, intersected Tunnel One. “That way, that way!” he rasped. Jesus God, he couldn’t breathe!

The bearded man, the one the other guy had called Bruce, reached forward, grabbed Jones’ left arm and yanked him around. “Duck your head,” Bruce commanded, and Jones did so. “A little more,” Bruce said. Jones put his chin against his sternum. Bruce let go of his throat, and before Jones could take a good breath, the bearded intruder and another man had grabbed the soles of his deck shoes and shoved.

Jones found himself being pushed into the OTV’s cargo compartment. He didn’t resist; there wasn’t any point in trying. His shoulder banged against something; reaching around, he realized that it was an oxygen tank. But he didn’t say anything, even as the hatch shut and he heard the locking wheel turn, sealing him into the cold, dark little chamber. He wasn’t a stupid person. His foot rubbed against the hatch, and he felt what had to be an inside unlocking level. Wait a few minutes, he said to himself, then they’ll be gone and you can get yourself out of here, and you can go get help. They wanted Module 13, he made himself remember.

Jones smiled. Maybe he wouldn’t lose his job after all.

Once the black guy was locked into the OTV and the hatch was closed, Popeye quickly studied the airlock’s pressurization controls as he unsnapped the seals on his gauntlets and pulled them off his hands. Then he touched a switch and watched as the digital pressure gauge sank by a fraction, about 1 psi, before he touched the switch again and stopped the depressurization. There. The slight drop in pressure wouldn’t matter much to their prisoner—make his ears pop, at worst—but it would prevent the hatch from being opened from the inside, since the airlock’s sensors would detect the pressure differential and would keep the hatch bolts from sliding back.

Hooker allowed himself a moment to relax. Okay, the second iffy part of this thing was over. They had managed to successfully rendezvous with Freedom Station, and someone had been on hand to pressurize the OTV from the outside and thus allow them to escape. Two
ifs
down. He had lost count of how many more they had to go….

“Okay, now what?” Virgin Bruce said. He was removing his own gauntlets and clipping them to his belt. He glanced over his shoulder, down the access tunnel into which they had emerged, as if expecting another crew member to appear at any moment. “C’mon, Jack, get your shit together. This is your plan, dammit.”

“Okay, okay. Just gimmie a minute, will you?” Hamilton was floating in the tunnel, doubled halfway over in a fetal position with his eyes closed. “Just a little disorientation. I had just gotten used to what was up and down in that thing; then I came out and found you and that guy upside down.” He opened his eyes slowly and blinked a few times. “Jesus, Bruce, did you have to treat him so rough?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Virgin Bruce said, He hooked his helmet to his belt, then checked the chronometer on the right sleeve of his suit’s overgarment. “It’s about 0715. What did she say…?”

“She’ll dock at about 0800.” Hamilton took a deep breath. “I’m fine. Okay, Module 13, Tunnel One, eh?” He nodded toward his right, where the tunnel they were in ended in a hatch. “The shuttle will be docking down here, which means that where we’re going is the opposite direction.”

He patted the left thigh-pocket of his suit, making sure that the thick envelope which Sloane had given him was in place. Satisfied that it was—he would have thrown himself out the airlock if it had not been there—he glanced at Popeye and Virgin Bruce. “Let’s go.”

Virgin Bruce grunted and pushed himself off a wall, guiding himself headfirst, deeper into Freedom Station. Jack was about to follow, but Popeye suddenly reached out with his arm and blocked him. The two men stared into each other’s faces for a moment.

“You’ve gone this far with me,” Hamilton whispered. “You’re going to have to trust me just a little bit longer.”

Popeye nodded slowly. “I know. I just wanted to tell you that if you’re yanking us around…”

“Well, you’re just going to have to take that chance, aren’t you?” Hamilton pushed Hooker’s arm aside and started after Bruce. Popeye watched him pass, then pushed himself off in their direction, saying nothing in reply.

I
HAD ALWAYS WONDERED
how Michael Collins had felt, and now I knew. Michael Collins, the Command Module pilot of the Apollo 11 mission back in 1969, who had sat out the long hours in the spacecraft
Columbia
while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history at Tranquility Base. For about twenty-five hours Collins was alone in the
Columbia
; once every forty-five minutes, as his ship swung around the far side of the Moon, he had no one to talk to except his tape recorder.