Perigee (2 page)

Damn!

She looked at the mission clock, knowing what this could mean if it shut down too soon. Mission abort—the one call nobody wanted to make, yet the ultimate reason they were here. Audrey looked up at the big screen as a long-lens camera tracked
Orion’s
climb, then chided herself as if staring at it would help discern the trouble looming inside.

No no no…that has to be bad data
,
she thought, calling up the backroom as another spike rolled across her screen. “How’s your feed, guys—any buggy sensors?”
Please
, she hoped.

Their reply was not comforting: “Negative, Aud. Telemetry’s solid. Number one’s chamber pressure is all over the place.”

And just like that, it jumped again, now into redline and staying there.

That settled it. Her next call came as quickly as she could form the words: “Flight, Booster; shut down number one!” Audrey cried, unable to disguise the alarm in her voice as she fought the cold lump forming in her stomach.

“Your call, FIDO,” Flight barked. They were barely outside the zone where a dead engine would demand an immediate launch abort, automatically firing the escape tower and pulling the crew capsule safely away.

“We’re go on that shutdown,” the flight dynamics officer answered without missing a beat. “Keep going on the other two...stand by…another forty-eight seconds.” He gave Audrey a reassuring wink and slipped a hand over his microphone. “No sweat,” he whispered. “Won’t be their last glitch, not by a long shot.”

“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” she grumbled. “Spaz-tastic.”

…

Deep inside
Orion’s
first stage, fuel and oxidizer surged through the other pumps as the remaining engines thundered away. This wasn’t the first time they had run. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time they had flown, being recycled Shuttle equipment. But instead of pushing an orbiter skyward, bolted to the side of a fuel tank, they were now at the bottom of the stack and flanked by those big solid boosters.

And the boosters rang like tuning forks.

As their vibrations coursed through the giant rocket, they reached the turbine’s own resonant frequency. Sub-microscopic cracks inside the pumps began to grow. Undetected during preflight inspections, it had been the expansion of similar cracks which caused the first pump’s troubles. Had quality-control inspectors been able to check them after this flight, there would have been no mistake. The strain had simply gotten the better of them.

The rest happened within a fraction of a second. Audrey saw the new pressure spike and nearly leapt from her seat, grabbing the console to steady herself. Just as she began to call in this new problem, number three came apart.

…

The pilots could detect a change in the ship’s ride as the master alarm blared in their headsets. There was a new sensation—a high-frequency vibration they could barely feel. Dan reached for the abort handle and could have sworn he heard a whistling sound just before their world ended.

The pump’s tremendous power gave it equal destructive potential, as the energy contained within was suddenly unleashed. The turbine exploded like a bomb, destroying the engine and casting shrapnel across a wide arc.

The fragments shredded propellant lines as they sliced through everything in their path. Tons of fuel ignited on contact and disintegrated what was left of the engine module. That, in turn, punctured the tank, adding its remaining fuel and oxidizer to the fiery mix just as
Orion’s
escape tower fired. As it raced to pull them away, the detonation struck the crew capsule with such force that its outer hull shattered.

There was barely enough time for the crew to realize something had gone horrendously wrong. As the craft tumbled away, severe g-forces from the sudden change in momentum rendered them all unconscious just before they were consumed by the expanding fireball.

Dan Wyatt had a brief awareness of being free of the spacecraft as it disintegrated around them. He could sense their protective cocoon had fallen apart, wrenched open to the deep black sky and glimmering sea far below. Alone inside his pressure suit, he was for a fleeting moment aware of the enveloping conflagration. Just as the blackness became all-consuming, it gave way to a brilliant warm light.

…

The environmental controller felt a chill as his screen went blank. “Flight, EECOM has lost telemetry,” he announced quietly.

The room became deathly silent.

“Roger EECOM,” Flight responded with practiced calm as he turned to his assistant: “Close the doors.”

With that, the assistant motioned for security guards to close and lock the double doors, the traditional signal that something terrible had just happened. No one would be allowed in or out until they had secured every disc, flash drive, tape reel and notepad related to the mission.

At her console, Audrey fought back the urge to cry, fearing any display of weakness that her male competitors would surely be on the lookout for. She chastised herself for that passing selfishness, yet couldn’t know how unnecessary it was. In the back room, some of her support engineers wept openly. Their system had failed everyone. They had killed the crew and maybe the entire program along with them. Audrey bit down hard on her lip as she pushed back those same feelings. Calmly gathering her notes and securing her console, she tasted a salty trickle of blood.

She heard the astronaut serving as capsule communicator begin calling them in a maddeningly stoic voice. “
Orion One
, Houston.
Orion
, Houston; comm check,” he beckoned, to no avail.

In the back row, the man they answered to as “Flight” stared at the big screen which now showed a falling cloud of debris where their ship,
their
crew, had once been. He swallowed deeply, not uttering a word as CapCom’s futile calls echoed throughout the room.

2

Above Newfoundland

“You may want to see this, Mr. Hammond,” the flight attendant said grimly as she handed over a touch-screen pad.

Arthur Hammond pushed his breakfast away and gave the young woman a quizzical look as he took the offered tablet. It was linked to the Gulfstream jet’s wireless network and paused on a garish “Breaking News” headline.

He started the video where his flight attendant had left it, past the ready-made melodramatic soundtrack and graphics (which she knew he detested) to get straight to the facts of
Orion 1
.

Rather, it at least got to those facts that were patently obvious.

Art Hammond had been in aerospace long enough to know that most reporting about it was utter baloney, accidents especially so. Driven by each network’s burning need to scoop the others, the rapid-fire news cycle uniformly ignored the tedious investigative work that would follow for months afterward.

But there was no mistaking the long-range video he saw from Canaveral. Though blurry, there was
Orion
, its exhaust plume tracing a slender arc across the sky.

Whoa
, he thought with a whistle.
They finally made that pig fly?
The reporter was babbling away in the background; Hammond reached for the mute button then thought better of it. This network at least had a halfway-competent space reporter, so he might as well listen. He turned up the volume as the video continued.

“NASA Public Affairs has not released any further statements. But we have been able to piece together a rough sequence of events from the live feed from Mission Control. One engine experienced a precautionary shutdown,” the man’s voice said as they promptly cut away from the tracking video to a hastily-rendered animation of the pump system.

Hammond cursed under his breath. “I know what the damned thing looks like!” he blurted before catching himself. Turning, he gave the flight attendant a sheepish look.

Settle down, Art. They didn’t make this special for you,
he reminded himself.

To his relief, the news feed returned to a clearer video of
Orion
in close-up: “Shutdown occurred before the strap-on boosters cut off,” he explained. “At about two minutes,” he continued, “a shower of sparks appeared around the main engines, apparently some kind of debris. Then, we see...just watch.”

At that second, the grainy video flashed white as the rocket exploded. A glowing mass tumbled ahead of the inferno. It had to be the crew capsule. Hammond audibly sucked in his breath at the cascade of glowing debris.

“Holy God,” he whispered, closing his eyes and unconsciously bowing his head. “Rest their souls.”

After a moment he opened his eyes to find his fists were clenched, almost to the point of being white-knuckled. His company had been involved in an earlier project called “commercial crew” before NASA had cannibalized all their funding to prop up
Orion
. He now felt the same sickening realization as the controllers in Houston: this was the end of the American space program. They’d spent too much money over too many years on a vehicle that could barely meet its expectations. And now it was resting with its crew at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Congress certainly wouldn’t keep this boondoggle going, he thought.
What a fix they’ve gotten us into, begging the Russians for rides on Soyuz
.

What was that old saying, he wondered—the Chinese symbol for “crisis” also means “opportunity”?

That was it, then. He stood, smoothed down his tie and slacks, and headed forward to the cockpit. Nodding towards the cabin attendant, he rapped briskly on the door and stepped inside. It was his airplane, after all.

“Tom?”

A lean man with salt-and-pepper hair pulled himself out of the left seat and stood in the small space behind it.

“Yes sir?”

“You know what happened, right?”

The pilot sighed. “Afraid so. There was lots of chatter on the air-to-air channel, so Gander center sent a blast message out to all operators with the story. Shut down the gossip, at least.” Regardless of any connections to the space program, the pilot community was a close-knit one. If something happened to one of their comrades, they all wanted to know about it. And absent hard facts, they would gossip like schoolgirls.

Hammond gave him the tablet. “Have a look”.

Tom Gentry’s jaw tensed as he watched the news. Finished, he handed the video over for his copilot to see. “Guess that’s it then,” he said.

“I sure as hell think so…no way they come back from this,” Hammond sighed. “You know anybody on that mission?” Gentry had once been a NASA research pilot and had many friends who’d moved on to Houston.

“Wyatt, the mission commander. He and his wife were friends from Dryden.”

Hammond frowned. “I understand. I’m sorry, Tom.”

Both men stood in silence, each sorting out his feelings. After a few minutes, Hammond absentmindedly brushed a hand across his scalp and thumbed his suspenders. He fished the Gulfstream-650 pilot’s handbook from a nearby cubbyhole and began idly flipping through it.

“You’re thinking about something else,” the pilot observed with a sideways glance as he checked his watch. “Still going to London, right?” he asked, mentally calculating the fuel they’d need if his boss turned them back home to Denver.

Hammond looked up with fiery eyes, his demeanor infused with new purpose. “Damn straight we are. And I need you to get the Farnborough propulsion lab on the Satcom channel. Give Malcolm our ETA and then let me talk to him. We’ve got work to do.”

“Work?” asked Gentry, wondering which components Hammond Aerospace may have contributed to
Orion
. None, so far as he knew. And the struggling airline his boss had just rescued from bankruptcy certainly had no connection.

“You heard me, Tom. Work. Lots of it. It’s time we blew the dust off a few ideas.”

Hammond took a long look around his airplane. The G-650 was headed across the North Atlantic at Mach .92; over ninety percent of the speed of sound. As the supersonic Concorde had ended service years ago, this was now the fastest passenger jet in the world.
It’s time for that to change,
he thought.

Slapping the Gulfstream manual into his pilot’s hands, Hammond fixed him with a determined stare. “How’d you like to fly something
really
fast?”

3

Above the South Pacific
Six Years Later

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain. We’ve turned on the Fasten Seatbelts sign which means we need you to prepare for initial descent. It’ll be a little bumpy on the way down, so please take your seats as soon as possible and buckle up tight.”

Tom Gentry placed the cabin interphone into its cradle and cinched down his shoulder straps. With a gentle tap on the controls, he rolled the plane back right-side up. They had been flying inverted—upside-down—for the past twenty minutes, much to their passengers’ delight.