Kip pulls his hand away, his mind moving steadily back over the checklist items needed to fire the engine. The checklist is in his lap, and he finds the right page and begins moving down the list, double-checking every switch, aware that more than a minute and a half have already passed and he’ll commit himself to landing somewhere way east of Mojave if they light off. The thought of waiting for another orbit flickers across his mind and is just as quickly swept away by the reality that he doesn’t know how much breathable air he has left.
“Ignition primary and secondary bus transfer switches should be off. They are. Ignition emergency disconnect relay one and two guarded on. Where are those? Oh yeah, they’re positioned right.”
He stares at the switches whose name he just spoke. Small red plastic covers known as “switch guards” cover each toggle switch to prevent a sleeve or wayward hand from accidentally flipping the tiny lever.
So are they off or on when closed?he wonders, opening one of the guards to expose the metal toggle lever inside.
It’s off. So when the guard is closed and down, the switch is off.
“Wait a minute.” He flips open both guards and moves the switches to the “on” position, double checking the language in the checklist.
“For God’s sake, don’t tell me that’s why the engine didn’t fire four days ago!”
Were they open or closed then, those guards? He read the checklist items very carefully on the first day, but the image in his memory of the two little switch guards is flip-flopping between whether they were open or closed. Up or down. He can’t remember.
At least now, he figures, they’re in the right position.
His breathing has accelerated and he can feel his heart pounding and his face reddening, more from embarrassment than anticipation. All this because he didn’t follow the checklist four days back?
Yet the thought is instantly calming, and in the space of only a few seconds he gets over it, embracing the thought that what he’s learned in accepting his own demise is worth a lifetime, and the thought that if the problem is that simple, then hallelujah! He’s going home.
Once again his index finger stabs at the ignition switch.
“One thousand meters, closing at five per second,” Mikhail intones in the calm voice of a man serenely on the razor edge of his technology.
Sergei Petrov nods, his eyes still focused on the radar screen and the just-received message from Baikonaur Mission Control that is wrinkling his features.
“You believe we should drop down in case he retrofires?” Sergei asks, knowing the finite amount of fuel in the maneuvering jets and estimating how much it will take to change orbit even that slightly.
“The warning came from NORAD, no?”
“Yes. NORAD. Not from Houston.”
“You’ve been watching with the binoculars, Sergei. Have you seen any movement? Any evidence that he’s seen the laser I’ve been flashing?”
“ Nyet.Nothing. But let me look again.”
Sergei plucks the instrument from where it’s been floating by his face and focuses once more on the forward windows of the backward-flying American space plane. The image steadies and suddenly looms larger, as if he’s triggered a zoom lens, and he shakes his head in confusion before pulling the glasses away and finding the very same zoom happening in his unaided vision.
“What am I…”
“Sergei!” Mikhail is barking the words. “He’s coming! Coming at us!”
The mission commander grabs for the controls, time dilation already slowing the sequence as the American craft looms larger in the Soyuzwindow, coming directly at them, Sergei recalling now the sight of a burst of somethingalongside the craft just as it started zooming in.
Sergei’s hand reaches the firing control and jams their main engine to life, thrusting forward while canting the angle of firing downward, but the oncoming vehicle is accelerating toward them.
A rapid calculation flashes through Mikhail’s mind pairing five hundred meters with the steady acceleration of the ASA ship and yielding a catastrophic closing speed by the time it reaches them.
Intrepidis looming large now, its relative closing speed marked more by how fast it seems to be growing in size than by any lateral movement, but at last the two cosmonauts can feel their craft thrusting ahead of the oncoming space plane’s trajectory as it approached soundlessly.
It’s too late to do more, and as the American spacecraft fills the forward window both men cringe in anticipation of a thunderous impact that doesn’t come.
As if it were a holographic projection, as soon as Intrepidfills their eyes, it flashes past, missing their craft by a tiny margin they can only guess at, shooting through the empty space around them, no wake turbulence to rattle their craft, and nothing but the accelerated heartbeats in the Soyuzcapsule to mark its passing.
“He fired his engine!” Mikhail says.
“You think?” Sergei says, staring into the same void with a death grip on the control stick. “The phrase they use in Houston is: No shit, Sherlock!”
Chapter 42
Kip doesn’t have a spare second to be confused.
No time to wonder about what flashed past the forward windscreen less than a minute after ignition. Maybe a satellite. Maybe nothing. Whatever it was, it seemed so incredibly close, yet, it whooshed past without a sound, like an illusion—some computer-generated sequence projected on the windscreen. He still has the mental image of what the thing looked like somewhere in his memory, and it’s a familiar shape somehow, but his attention is too focused on the forward panel to think it through.
Kip’s right hand is working the sidestick controller constantly with small, intense movements, and there’s a tiny flash of pride that he’s already learned not to overcontrol. Three g’s of thrust are pressing at his back and pulling at his face, but it’s all as handleable as the ascent was four days ago.
The physical impact of the light off was nothing compared to the psychological shock that the engine really fired. His mind is still trying to work through how that happened. At the same time, he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t do anything else terribly wrong, like face the rocket engine the wrong way and boost himself on a one-way trip to outer space. He’s already figured out that, with enough fuel left to subtract seventeen thousand miles an hour of momentum, this spacecraft, if turned in the opposite direction, could easily reach the escape velocity of twenty-three thousand miles per hour and soar away from Earth’s gravity forever.
He double-checks that he’s aimed Intrepid’s nozzles in the right direction, and holds the ship steady with a massive force of will, playing a video game with life-or-death consequences in keeping the tiny dot in the “V” on the attitude indicator screen. The nose slowly comes up, changing the rocket engine’s thrust vector from all horizontal deceleration to a mix of both vertical and horizontal, keeping gravity from yanking Intrepidtoo rapidly back toward Earth.
The engine should cut out, the checklist says, when he’s at eighty degrees nose up, still flying backward, at an altitude of ninety miles and dropping at less than three hundred miles per hour, with almost no forward speed. Intrepid,he knows, uses fuel and thrust to slow down instead of trading speed for heat—using the type of red-hot thermal braking through the atmosphere that incinerated the shuttle Columbiayears ago. He’ll have less than a minute, when the fuel runs out and Intrepidbegins to freefall, to use the reaction thrusters to raise the tail and turn the space plane completely around. Then he’ll be falling like some sort of man-made leaf into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, belly first, never going fast enough through the thickening air to melt the structure with frictional heating.