“I have it, Jack!”
Parker’s deep voice filled the darkened flightdeck.
The AC facing aft grabbed the attitude control stick located in the center of the rear instrument arrays between the two rear windows in the wall.
“I got it!” Parker shouted hoarsely.
The command pilot violently jerked the rotational hand controller. Instantly, Mother fired a battery of jets in the two OMS pods sending out fiery plumes on each side of the inverted tailfin.
Outside, the long vertical tail was no longer orange, although the rear walls of the bay still glowed. The tall tail was a flat, faint blue-green: the color of high-intensity, laser light.
The tail thrusters pushed Shuttle’s hindquarter skyward and the inverted nose dipped toward the sea.
“What the…” Enright craned his neck to look back at Parker.
“We’re hit! We’re hit, Jack!”
The AC steered the tail out of the eerie green glow which lasted five seconds.
“Damn!” Enright shouted as warning horns blared and lights flashed on the Caution and Warning panel on the upper center of the forward instrument panel between him and Karpov.
“Left OMS! APU temp!” Enright read the two flashing caution lights.
The Colonel worked his attitude hand controller. Slowly, the heavy ship came to a stop with her body vertical. Out the rear window, Parker saw the tail fin move slowly across a faint starfield visible with the cabin lights dimmed. With Shuttle’s rear end pointing straight up, the square stern of the open payload bay moved southeast across the bright, southern constellation Canis Major at 08 hours 24 minutes. Just northeast of the upright tail, Sirius, the heavens’ brightest star, moved like a brilliant white beacon.
“Hittin’ the lights, Number One.”
Parker cranked up the flightdeck lights. Enright glanced at the mission clock under his forward windshield.
“08 plus 25, Skip. We’re out.”
Endeavor darted vertically out of the Anomaly over open water 550 statute miles southwest of Cape Town, South Africa.
“There it is, Jack.”
The AC had powered up the payload bay lighting. He looked through the harsh glare in the bay to the tail section. To the port side of the tail’s base, the left OMS pod was enveloped in a brown cloud of vaporous monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide escaping from laser-melted and ruptured fuel tanks. Within the thickening cloud were chunks of heatshield tiles. A tangled mess of pipes and tubing protruded from the left OMS pod.
“That’s all she wrote on the left OMS, Jacob.”
The Aircraft Commander’s voice was very calm, very matter-of-fact. The consummate aviator: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We’re circling Newark in this little thunderstorm up here. Ah, Number One is feathered and Number Two is running a little hot. But, ah, we’ll be at the old gate right on time. Thank you for flying with us tonight. Hope to see you all again real soon.”
“Yeh, Will. Goin’ to zero-zero on Left OMS consumables.” Enright squinted through his bandages at the glass meters above the right-center window above Karpov’s anxious face.
“Check on Brother Ivan, Jack.”
“Right… Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor has sustained maneuvering system damage aft. No cabin damage. Status there? Over.”
Enright, Parker, and Major Karpov waited.
“Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?” The voice was Parker’s as the lighted bay filled with brown gas which glistened with sublimating frost in the frozen nighttime vacuum.
“Uri!” Alexi Karpov pressed his mike button. Perspiration beaded upon his face round and puffy from twenty hours of weightlessness.
“Endeavor, Endeavor: Configure AOS by Botswana at 08 plus 26. With you for 45 seconds only. We show you zip on Left OMS tanks with two hot APUs. LACE is well inbound now, 90 ahead of you, 70 cross-range, 37 below. Good work, guys!.. Advise status. LOS in 20 seconds.”
“AC here, Colorado… We took a broadside from your blackbird. I dumped the RMS arm… Left OMS up in smoke… Suspect internal damage aft fuselage with APU damage… Negative contact with Soyuz. This is Endeavor.”
“Oh…” The ground was lost in static as Shuttle rounded the southern tip of Africa over water. Another 25 minutes of Indian Ocean out of radio range lay ahead.
“When’s sunup, Jack?”
“Ah… in 14, Skipper.”
“ ’Kay. Try Soyuz again.”
“Soyuz, Soyuz. Endeavor. Over?”
As Enright spoke, Karpov leaned forward to look up under the top sill of his windows. He saw only darkness.
“Could be antenna damage, Alexi.” Enright’s voice was unconvincing.
“n’Da… Yes. Could be,” the Russian pilot sighed at Enright’s right.
Endeavor’s downward pointing nose drifted to the left as seen from the front seats. No RCS jet had fired. Parker in the rear saw the tail slowly tilt to his left against faint stars overhead.
“She’s venting from the left OMS, Jack. Bit of a lateral movement from the outgasing. Real garbage pile out here.”
“Yeh, Will. I see us yawing to portside… Soyuz, do you read Endeavor?”
“Maybe come around. Get the bay lights on him.” Parker watched the brown cloud dissipate in the payload bay.
“In motion, Skipper. Left OMS idle-cutoff.”
Enright threw a battery of switches on a center ceiling instrument cluster. He closed whatever propellant lines remained in the left tail pod.
The copilot turned Shuttle on her nose by using the nose jets and the right-only OMS pod’s RCS thrusters. Endeavor rolled clumsily with a slight wobble. She was not designed to fly without half of her tail thrusters.
The vertical tail rolled with the ship still upright. Parker squinted into the black sky beyond the bay’s brilliant arc lights.
The payload bay slowly came around to face southward in the Indian Ocean 35 degrees south of the Equator. Parker peered through his aft overhead window behind Karpov to the position of Soyuz and her lone pilot, Uri Ruslanovich, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Mechanical Engineering.
All three pilots in Shuttle exhaled at the same instant the bay’s harsh glare fell silently upon an enormous cloud of white gas, bent scrap metal, and frozen liquid globules, barely visible in the nighttime distance 600 yards from Endeavor.
16
Will Parker had seen the same yellow cloud of rubble exactly four hours earlier. His mind recognized it before his heart had time to absorb the ugliness.
Having rounded the southern tip of Africa, Endeavor sped northeast toward the Equator 2,000 nautical miles away. In the darkness over the Indian Ocean, the crippled starship flew alone. First there had been three vessels among the stars, then four, then three again. Now there was one ship badly mangled and a cloud of wreckage a quarter mile from Shuttle.
“Alexi, I am truly, truly sorry.” Enright broke the sullen silence where he floated against his lap belt at Karpov’s side. “So very sorry.”
In the aft section, Parker blinked his moist eyes which looked into the brightly lighted bay. The sixty-foot-long cargo hold still carried a brown cloud leaking from Shuttle’s ruptured tail. An airman feels his ship’s pain, like a mother for her child. The haggard Colonel ached inside.
Major Alexi Karpov turned his wet eyes toward the large window at his right shoulder in the copilot’s seat. “They will issue a proper statement, of course: The Soviet Union has lost a brave son.’ Our governments are so good at that.”
“A brave son,” Parker sighed into his voice-activated microphone at his lips.
“My country has lost a son,” Karpov said slowly, fogging the window with his anguish. “But I have lost a brother.”