The hair behind Parker’s neck tingled where his helmet ended at his water-cooled drawers.
LACE’s beam of light was faint with the sparkling Pacific behind it. But Parker topside and Enright below clearly saw the light strike and remain upon the manned Chinese ship.
In the instant between heartbeats, the Chinese vessel pitched forward toward LACE. The intruder’s spherical head cartwheeled forward as if her thick body had been jerked backward from beneath her black, iron feet.
In the blink of Parker’s wide eyes, the round head of the tumbling Chinese ship passed directly through LACE’s steady, blue-green beam. The Chinese craft excreted a fine cloud of gas and glittering flakes of frost which she had carried on her cold side away from the sun. A huge teardrop cloud of gas, shining frost, and tiny bits of debris swelled around the craft. In the brilliant sunlight, the Chinese vessel was nearly invisible inside a gauzelike shroud which silently leaked from her ruptured hull. A ship was dying.
The round forward module of the doomed vessel bowed toward LACE. Within a spreading cloud of gas, the head of the Chinese craft took LACE’s lasing broadside for only three seconds.
In the instant before the dying ship exploded without sound, Parker sat frozen on the flightdeck as LACE’s thick green beam reflected off the Chinese death ship.
LACE’s beam bounced at a right angle off the Chinese hulk. Its reflected laser beam shot sideways silently into Endeavor.
As a reflex, Parker lifted his bootless feet off the floor under the instrument panel. He watched the beam of energy lie silently against Endeavor’s glass body beneath his left side.
In an instant, the lased photons stopped.
12
“Jacob!”
The command pilot’s voice over the intercom was shrill. Outside, Endeavor’s six forward windows were covered with a cloud of vaporous debris. Parker momentarily paused to listen and feel for any impact upon Endeavor’s fragile glass flanks. Shuttle was bedrock stable as Mother held the con in her firm hand.
“Jack!” the seated AC shouted into his faceplate.
The headset within the Colonel’s helmet was silent.
In one motion, Parker pushed his seat back along its floor tracks as he pulled his communications plugs and released his lap belt. He floated from his seat, rolled over in mid-air, and soared helmet-first down the hatch hole behind his seat.
As the flier floated from the ceiling hole into the middeck, he turned his face toward the window of the side entry hatch. Where he expected to see Enright, he saw only the round window. Beyond the hatch window was a thick yellow cloud. For an instant, he recognized a pilot’s recurring nightmare of the view when descending below minimums on short final.
Parker somersaulted weightlessly until he was right-side up. He held his position with his hands braced against the basement ceiling. In his long underwear from which disconnected water tubes floated, the AC’s stocking feet were a foot off the floor. When he whispered, “Jack,” no one heard him. He was not plugged into a communications plug and did not wear a wireless headset.
Parker hovered in the air. He swallowed hard behind his closed faceplate.
Opposite the cloudy window of the side hatch, Jacob Enright stood rigidly with his face hidden by his silvered EVA visor.
Enright was right-side up with his PLSS backpack touching the sleeping berths on the starboard side of the mid-deck. The air pressure in his EMU suit forced his arms straight out at his sides. Floating with his boots and massive white legs two feet off the floor, the copilot hung motionless. He resembled a hard-suited Scarecrow waiting patiently for Dorothy and The Tin Man to cut him down.
“Jacob” Parker breathed inside his heavy helmet where no one could hear.
The AC pushed his helmet from his sweating head. The plastic container banged behind him against the latrine door. He swam to his partner.
Without his helmet, Parker could hear Enright’s backpack softly humming as its fans, pumps, and condensers cooled and scrubbed the silent airman’s claustrophobic world.
Parker placed his large hands on either side of Enright’s small chestpack. He pulled his copilot down from where his helmet touched the ceiling. The AC could feel the rigidity of Enright’s body inside the massive suit.
Parker carefully moved Enright to the center of the cabin where he eased the silent load sideways. Enright floated spread-eagle in the center of the mid-deck. Parker gently pushed him toward the floor until Enright hovered on his back with his PLSS backpack six inches off the floor.
In the perpetual freefall of orbit, neither pilot had any weight. But they did have mass. With one hand on the cabin’s handrails which jutted from walls, floor, and ceiling, Parker’s free hand was maneuvering a ponderous mass. He moved what on Earth would have been a 150-pound pilot inside a stiff 225-pound space suit. Although Parker had steered Enright’s body to the floor in seconds, the command pilot had worked himself into a sweat. Each instant he pushed Enright, the force shoved Parker backward in his weightless state. Pushing Enright to the floor only sent Parker floating upward to the ceiling. The AC was panting with perspiration burning his eyes when Enright’s back bounced lightly off the floor.
The AC straddled his rigid partner. He braced one foot through each of Enright’s armpits. Bending well over, Parker wedged his bare, wet head against the airlock. Enright’s silver outer helmet was between Parker’s mesh-covered shins, one swollen twice the size of the other. Twice every second, the AC’s right calf throbbed hotly in time with his pounding temples.
Crouching over Enright who did not stir, the pilot in command gently lifted off his partner’s extra vehicular activity outer visor. The bubble visor floated out of Parker’s moist hands toward the ceiling.
“Jack,” Parker whispered.
Between the tall airman’s knees, he saw Enright within the fishbowl, pressurized helmet. Will Parker did not recognize the face.
“Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado with you by Goldstone at 04 hours and 36 minutes.” Parker could not hear the ground’s transmission, which stopped upstairs on the flightdeck at his empty earphone plug. Shuttle approached the California coast 800 miles away in piercing noontime sun.
“Jack,” the kneeling pilot sighed. His breath fogged the outside of the clear helmet, chilled by the PLSS air blowing from the vent behind Enright’s head.
Jacob Enright’s face was cherry red and swollen to twice its normal size. The puffy cheeks creased around swollen, thin slits of tightly closed eyes. Having lost its normal proportions, Enright’s face looked like the face of a red and distressed newborn infant.
“Endeavor, Endeavor… We have PM downlink. Negative voice. Check your audio panels. Colorado standing by at 04 plus 39.” The great dish antenna at Goldstone, California, beeped to no one as Shuttle crossed the coastline at Santa Cruz, 120 miles south of San Francisco.
Parker tightened his knees, which held Enright’s stiff armpits to the mid-deck floor. Carefully, the AC laid a large palm on each side of his partner’s helmet. With a quick, quarter turn of the bubble helmet, he broke the pressure seal of the neckring. The helmet’s seal popped under its internal pressure with the sound of a pop-top beer can. A rush of cool air from the open neckring washed over Parker’s face, wet with sweat. The chilly breeze which continued to blow from the back of the helmet smelled of sweat, rubber hoses, and cooked meat.
Parker grimaced as he disconnected the thin air tube which ran from the inside of the EMU suit to the helmet’s vent pad behind Enright’s head wearing the soft Snoopy communications helmet. Enright’s thickly puffy lips pressed against the two microphone booms jutting from the cheeks of the Communications Carrier Assembly. The soft CCA had been dubbed “Snoopy helmet” back in Apollo and so it remained.