I’ll kill you, you sonofabitch, Dan snarled inwardly. But the figure folded into a fetal position and went limp, drifting slowly upward above the instrument panel.
His hands shaking with barely controlled rage, Dan unfastened its helmet and yanked it off the EMU. Lance Muncie’s head lolled around in the collar of the suit, his youthful face almost cherubic in unconsciousness.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dan said out loud. The anger drained out of him. Muncie. He must have gone berserk.
Dan shoved Lance out of the command center and anchored himself at the control panel. The instrument panel was ablaze with warning lights. Even with the alarm channel shut off, the whooping and ringing seeped into his helmet. His fingers tapped out a set of commands. The data readout showed that the tumble had begun with a short burst from the port zenith translation thruster at 1015 hours. The control moment gyroscopes had automatically tried to contain the torque generated by the burst, but they were quickly saturated and shut off automatically. A second firing command was issued seven minutes later. That’s what caused the surge that knocked me back through the tunnel, Dan realized. The computer indicated that the thruster was still firing. The station wasn’t only spinning. It was twisting and twanging like a paper kite caught in a high wind.
Can’t abandon the station, he realized. The whole damned crew is too high to even hear the warning signals.
Muncie hadn’t done that, he knew. One of the wiseass scientists had put something in the station’s air. That was the only explanation.
“You’re going to have to bring her back under control, mister,” he muttered to himself. “You used to be a flier. Let’s see if you still have the good stuff.”
Strangely, he felt no fear. No more anger. He was as calm inside as he had ever been in the cockpit of an airplane or spacecraft. There was no room for emotions when he had his hands on the controls of a dangerously careening craft. There was hardly any room for Dan Tighe to think about himself. He was one with the vehicle he was trying to control; he and this beautiful piece of machinery beneath his hands merged into a single being, nerves melding with electrical circuits, mind and machine, flesh and metal becoming one living entity.
Dan looked out the viewport and located the nadir trailing edge of the diamond against the dizzying sky. The solar panel and radiator were flapping like slow-motion bird’s wings. The blue-and-white curve of the Earth slid past, then disappeared from his view. He could see a few stars in the darkness out there, whipping by so fast it almost made him dizzy.
Got to work fast. The solar panels were useless without proper orientation. Once the station lost power there would be no hope of regaining control. The station would spin and spin until it tore itself apart.
Something flashed in the corner of his vision. Leaning forward to get a better look out the window through his helmet visor, Dan saw the RMS arm weaving back and forth against the black background of space like the long, thin, bony arm of a gigantic Halloween skeleton. It’s pulled loose of its restraint, he realized. Soon it would wrench free altogether and start bashing the station like a battering ram.
The Earth spun into view again. Dan keyed in a command for a display of attitude rates calculated by the inertial measurement unit. If the spin rates haven’t already exceeded the ACS’s limits, Dan told himself, maybe we can bring this Tinkertoy to heel. If not…
For a brief moment, the spin rates flashed—one revolution per minute, one point two—then the numbers exploded into garbage characters. The ACS’s limit had been exceeded; the primary system was out of commission. The station was in a three-axis tumble.
Dan disengaged from his foot restraints and frantically rummaged through a nearby tool compartment. The cabin lights winked out. The command module darkened as the viewport spun away from the glow of the Earth. Dan whirled to the computer. A warning flashed: “Solar panel drive failure.” Then the screen died.
Ramsanjawi lay flat on the bulkhead next to the rumpus-room hatch. With his lungs heaving and his legs as shaky as rubber, he struggled upright. His hands just reached the hatch of the CERV port.
The hatch seemed as heavy as a bank vault’s. His first pull yielded nothing. The second opened the hatch briefly before it slammed shut again, nearly taking his fingers. He took a deep breath and steeled himself for one monumental pull. Slowly, the hatch peeled back. One inch, two inches, six inches. Then gravity was on his side, and the hatch snapped open.
Ramsanjawi crawled through the port and into the lifeboat. Six months’ training, he thought; what a laugh. With a mere few hours of observation during and after those mindless evacuation drills, he had deduced the method of piloting the lifeboat to Earth. And even if he drifted in orbit, there was little to fear. NASA certainly would not forsake the sole survivor of Trikon Station.
Above the constant din of the alarms came a loud crash. The entire lifeboat shuddered.
The force of the landing stunned O’Donnell. When he saw the open CERV port, his senses cleared. He bounced up, hooked the port’s rim with his gloves, and jerked himself through. His helmet smashed against the CERV hatch as it swung shut. O’Donnell used all his strength to prevent the hatch from locking. Wedging himself in the connecting station hatchway that Ramsanjawi had struggled to open a few moments earlier, O’Donnell pushed and pushed against the CERV hatch, feeling a slight give. Suddenly, the hatch released and he flew into the lifeboat. He landed against the far bulkhead and became entangled in the loose harnesses. Ramsanjawi gathered his satchel and fled the CERV, billowing into the connecting tunnel. O’Donnell freed himself and bounded after him.
Ramsanjawi had no time to open the other lifeboat port; O’Donnell was right on his heels. He clawed his way up the wall of the connecting tunnel and dropped into the wardroom. O’Donnell followed.
The centrifugal force had turned the module’s wall into its floor, and both men clambered like harbor seals over the newly horizontal galleys. Ramsanjawi opened a galley door and began winging trays. They flew like lethal frisbees, crisply slicing through the air as O’Donnell instinctively ducked away from them. One hit the shoulder of his suit and bounced off, wobbling through the air.
Then the wardroom was plunged into darkness.
“Oh, shit,” O’Donnell snapped. A tray clattered against the galley behind him. A single emergency light, glowing weakly from what had been the ceiling, cast thick slabs of shadow. O’Donnell carefully raised his helmeted head. No other trays came whizzing at him.
Ramsanjawi was nowhere in sight. O’Donnell climbed across the last of the galleys and peered through the horizontal doorway into the ex/rec area. An emergency light glowed there as well; the exercise machines and game tables, now growing out of the wall, were wrapped in shadow.
O’Donnell hooked himself over the edge of the doorway. A hand reached out of the darkness and dragged him through. He landed on his head, stayed upright for a second, then toppled onto his back. Something flashed above him. He tried to roll over, but the edge of the tray caught him in the ribs. The pain stung.
Ramsanjawi bolted for the door. O’Donnell desperately swung out a leg to trip him. The satchel popped out of the kurta and sailed into the upturned equipment. Both men scrambled after it like opposing linemen vying for a loose football on a wet field. Ramsanjawi came up with it and lurched away. O’Donnell hurled himself after him.
It was a crunching tackle.
O’Donnell drove the shoulder of his hardened EMU suit into Ramsanjawi’s ribs, and both men fell into the rowing machine. One of O’Donnell’s legs became wedged in the mechanism. He tried to brace himself, but his weight combined with Ramsanjawi’s was too much. The sound of his shinbone snapping echoed through his EMU. He roared with the sudden unbearable pain.