Like we needed this bullshit! Stetson said to himself. “Tony, you take care of the doctor while I stop us from tumbling.” Stetson moved to the control panel and reengaged the automatic pilot. At that moment, orange and red lights began popping up across the ship’s status screens.
He said, “Captain Hui. Use some duct tape from the mechanical kit to tie up your friend. It ought to hold him. I’ve got to figure out what’s happened and why the screen looks like a Christmas tree.”
“Bill! You need to see this.” Chow looked up from Dr. Xu’s injured leg and motioned toward the hundreds of perfectly spherical red balls of blood circling in the air near the center of the crew cabin.
Stetson looked toward the blood and didn’t like what he saw. The spheres were moving toward the center of the Orion and swirling slowly around each other as they also moved toward the floor. As they neared the floor, they swirled around each other in a tighter circle, moving faster and faster, until they finally disappeared. A miniature funnel cloud had formed in the Orion, with the tip of the funnel being a hole in the floor made by one of Zhi’s bullets. They were losing air.
Stetson quipped, “That explains one of the alarms.” He moved toward the hole to get a closer look.
“I’ll use the patch kit. We have it aboard in case of a micro-meteor strike.” He moved to one of the storage bins along the outside wall of the capsule and opened a compartment. Inside the compartment was a small container filled with what looked like Silly Putty. The kit was standard issue aboard the Orion and designed for the purpose of repairing damage caused by a tiny meteor or orbital debris. Space was filled with small meteors, and, over time, the probability of a spacecraft getting hit was large enough to consider it a serious threat. The sealant could patch a small hole and keep the Orion from losing atmosphere.
“This patch ought to work.” Stetson carefully removed the putty from the container and filled the hole. The remaining blood spheres slowly dispersed after the airflow out of the cabin stopped.
“Zhi is secure. How may I help?” asked Hui.
Stetson looked toward the Chinese captain and saw that she had not only securely bound the renegade engineer but had taped his mouth shut as well.
“Uh…” Stetson thought for a second. “Why don’t you answer the radio while I tend to the rest of the alerts? The headset is on the control panel.”
Hui moved out from her position on the upper deck toward the control panel, eased on the headset and activated the radio.
“This is Captain Hui, speaking for Captain Stetson. Umm, how may I be of assistance?”
Stetson had to laugh and then said, “I bet they didn’t expect her to answer.”
He moved to the control panel and positioned himself only a few inches from his Chinese counterpart as she described the violence that had transpired aboard the ship to the ground crew back in Texas.
Stetson looked at the myriad of ship-status alerts and slowly turned them off, one by one, until only a few orange lights remained. None of them were still red, which meant the ship was not in imminent danger.
“Captain Stetson, your mission controllers wish to speak with you.” Hui slipped the headset from her head and handed it to him.
Stetson declined the headset, switched the audio to the loudspeaker, and said, “This is Stetson.”
“Bill, we were more than a little surprised to hear Captain Hui answer our call. We’ve been trying to reach you for quite some time. She says that you have everything under control and that the hole in the floor is sealed. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“How is Dr. Xu?”
Stetson looked toward Tony and Xu. Though he was obviously in pain, Xu gave a thumbs-up sign. Tony, after only a brief moment of hesitation, also gave a thumbs-up.
“He’ll make it.”
“Glad to hear it.” The mission controller then hesitated before he said, “Bill, there’s another problem you need to know about. The hole that you patched probably pierced the heat shield. The patch you put in place will keep you from losing atmosphere, but it will never survive the heat of reentry. Our models indicate that the hole on the outside of the ship is probably two or three times larger than what you see on the inside. The energy of the bullet was mostly deposited in the outer skin. If you don’t patch it on the outside with the heat-shield repair kit, then you might not survive the aerocapture.”
“EVA?” Stetson said.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to. Are you up for it?”
“Well, I am certainly okay with going out, but I am not sure about what to do with the rest of my crew. Their suits are a mess. It’ll take us some time to clean them for reuse. How much time do I have before we have to jettison the lander and begin reentry procedures?” The lander was not designed to return home to Earth. Before the Orion made its final entry into the Earth’s atmosphere for the upcoming aerocapture maneuver, the lander would have to be jettisoned. The big kicker would be if they had time to get in their suits and to complete an EVA before the aerocapture procedures began.
“Six hours.”
Not much time, Stetson thought. Then he replied, “That’s plenty of time. Stetson out.”
“Okay, folks, we’ve got to get suited up quickly. I’ve got to go outside and play.”
“You have another patch kit?” Hui asked.
“Yes. After the Columbia accident back in 2003, NASA developed a technique for patching damage to the shuttle’s heat shields so that similar accidents could be prevented. The requirement applied to the Orion as well—here we are. The heat-shield patch kit is stored near the one I just used. Without it, that hole will allow hot gases inside the ship and act like a blowtorch. We would never survive that.”
It took twenty minutes to get the injured Dr. Xu into his suit. Another thirty-five to get the unconscious pilot back into his suit. At first Zhi acted as if he were going to refuse to put his suit on, so Hui asked Stetson to hold the pistol on him while she and Tony supervised his suiting up. They then proceeded to duct tape him back down. That took another thirty minutes.
Chow opened up a secure radio channel to Stetson. “Bill, can we repressurize the Orion while you are on the EVA so I can have access to my patients? If one of them were to need attention, I’d like to be able to get to them quickly.”
“I don’t see why not. That way you can monitor the ship and run through the checklists again also. We know the damage that was caused by one of the bullets, but not the other two. I’d rather find out now than during aerocapture. How is Dr. Xu, really?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood, and the bullet severed his fibula—one of the bones in the lower leg. He’s stable but in a lot of pain. He should be okay if we can get him to a hospital soon. Putting him back in the suit was very painful for him. I gave him some morphine.”
“Okay, we’ve got just a little more than five hours to fix the ship, get back in, and get ready for aerocapture,” Stetson said. “Everybody has masks down and is ready for depressurization. Then Hui and I go outside and look for the damage on the ship. Once we find the damage, she comes back inside while I do the repair. It’s a one-person job anyway. While I’m outside, you repressurize the cabin. When I want back in, you do it all again in reverse order. That’s the plan. Got it?”
“Got it, Bill.” Tony nodded.