Space Station Down Read online

  But Kimberly realized that at this moment it was up to her, the two Russians, and one other American. They couldn’t rely on NASA to do anything in the station that they couldn’t do for themselves.

  The comm link to NASA Headquarters was out, she realized. Not responding. Then she remembered that the link had been working just moments before, when Scott’s voice had been broadcasting over the monitor in his official duty as today’s CAPCOM while the Soyuz had docked.

  She knew that the feed was being sent out over NASA TV, and in addition to being picked up by the Russian space program, every major network and news channel back on Earth would have someone watching the feed, even if it was only a lowly summer intern. Their only job was to watch for anything that might occur aboard the ISS that might be worthy of shooting to the newsroom—or even breaking into their regularly scheduled broadcast, if it was important enough.

  None of the big guys wanted to be scooped with breaking news by their competitors. Being first meant being able to charge more for commercial airtime, and that meant more bucks. Which was the real name of the game, not news just for the altruistic sake of news.

  Kimberly quickly ran through the alternate links emanating from the ISS. One after another they showed that nothing was being transmitted or received. Running her fingers over the touchscreen, she called up the backup satellite-to-satellite relay. That too was dead.

  This wasn’t just a technical malfunction; it was a deliberate severing of the entire station-to-ground communication links.

  She felt her pulse racing faster, her heart beating so hard it seemed to be trying to burst out of her ribs. Farid. He must have cut the links. He was a computer scientist; he knew exactly how to do it. With his past six-month tour on the ISS he had more than enough experience to control the entire station.

  Looking around the crowded compartment, Kimberly kicked out and shot through the air, reaching for one of the white cloth bags secured to the JPM wall that held a potpourri of tools. Her feet glided upward as she grabbed the bag and unfastened its Velcro strap. Fumbling inside, she pulled out two foot-long wrenches and an oversized screwdriver.

  Guns were prohibited aboard the ISS. The purpose was to prevent any violence that might occur from people crowded together in an inescapable environment for months—even years—at a time. Bullets would only punch holes in the station’s thin aluminum siding, letting the air escape and killing everyone inside.

  For the same reason the Russians had decreed that knives were not allowed on the ISS either, although Kimberly knew there was an ultrasharp utility knife stowed away in Shep’s toolkit—the grab bag of various odd tools Bill Shepherd had brought up with him when he had served on the ISS. Nobody but Shepherd, a free-spirited ex-Navy SEAL, could have gotten away with such a flouting of the rules. Several crew members had used the knife when they needed it. Nobody complained about it and HQ didn’t know it existed. Kimberly was pretty certain Shep’s bag—and the knife—were still in the JPM where Shepherd had stored it, but she couldn’t find it.

  From what she’d just seen, Kimberly wasn’t thinking about using an approved, standardized weapon to defend herself, or following any international rules that had been negotiated and talked to death by chair-bound bureaucrats. These madmen would be coming after her. She was totally focused on survival.

  Kimberly knew she didn’t have time for discussions or new age, touchy-feely, get-in-touch-with-your-emotions, hand-holding séances. These bastards were coming for her, and she had to be able to defend herself. They’d already murdered three men; what were they going to do next?

  She thought she knew. Farid and his companion were out to kill everyone on the station.

  Sooner or later they would come for her.

  Sooner, she realized. Not later.

  She began to tremble. They want to kill me!

  But then she remembered her father, all those years ago. And the fear inside her subsided. It did not disappear altogether, but now it was overlaid by an icy, pitiless resolve.

  Those murdering sons of bitches, she thought. I’ll kill them. Both of them.

  But how?

  FLASHBACK: KIMBERLY, AGE 10

  Her eyes nearly blinded with tears, ten-year-old Kimberly fled out of the schoolyard, stumbled across Porter Road, and ran all the way home.

  My dress, she kept thinking. My new dress. They ruined it.

  Her mother was in the front yard, working on her bed of chrysanthemums. Once she saw Kimberly she dropped her trowel and ran to her only child, her normally placid Japanese features wide-eyed with sudden alarm.

  “What happened?” her mother shouted. “Your dress is filthy!”

  Kimberly rushed to her arms, still crying. She tried to explain between gasping sobs. “They said I was too dark to wear a white dress! They threw mud at me! Five of them!”

  Mama brushed the tears away, wrapped a protective arm around her daughter, and led her into the house. Kimberly’s father was at the door, his lean, ascetic face worried, alarmed.

  It took several minutes for them to get Kimberly soothed down. Mama led her upstairs, helped her take off the ruined dress, and cleaned her up.

  “There were five of them,” Kimberly told her, calmer now. “Marla Kingston was the leader. I hate her!”

  It was the first day of the new term. Kimberly had been advanced one whole grade, she was so bright. But some of the older girls did not like their new dark-skinned arrival.

  “Five of them,” Kimberly repeated. “They threw mud at me. They said I was too dark to be with them.”

  By the time Mama led her downstairs again Kimberly was almost calm. But she could feel the anger burning inside her.

  Her father was waiting at the foot of the stairs. “Come with me, Kimberly,” he said, leading her into his office.

  Dr. Harold Hadid was a third-generation Saudi Englishman who had emigrated to the United States to pursue a career in neurosurgery. Tall and reserved, he’d had to face the inborn, unconscious intolerance of the British class system and decided to move to America. There he had met his California-born, Japanese American wife, excelled in school at Johns Hopkins, and settled in the Washington, D.C., area.

  He sat Kimberly in the big leather armchair that was usually reserved for guests and listened patiently to her story about the other girls’ bullying.

  “I hate her!” Kimberly concluded. “Marla Kingston. I hate her!”

  Sitting on the rocker next to her, Papa raised a slim finger.

  “Hate is a vicious emotion,” he said softly. “It can lead you to do things you’ll regret later on.”

  “But she—”

  With one of his rare smiles, Papa said, “Let me give a word of advice, Kimberly. An American politician, a U.S. senator, in fact, once said, ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’ Think about that.”

  Kimberly did think about it. When she returned to school later that day, she went straight to the principal’s office to explain that she had gone home to change her dress, which had somehow gotten begrimed with mud.

  She kept to herself, avoiding most of the other girls in her class, and everyone forgot about Kimberly’s muddied dress.…

  A few months later, she won the top score in the class’s state exams. And somehow Marla Kingston’s paper disappeared and she had to retake the test after regular class hours. Even then, her paper was rejected by the computer scoring device because of illegible handwritten sections.

  And years later, when Kimberly and Marla Kingston were seniors at Johns Hopkins University, Marla’s cell phones, laptops, and other digital devices malfunctioned so often that Ms. Kingston was reduced to tears.

  Don’t get mad, get even.

  JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, ISS CONTROL CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Although he was on the ground and not in space, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Robinson took the initiative, as he’d been trained. Shocked and incredulous, he was sitting in front of the new, organic LED panel with the CAPCOM sign atop it, his earphones danglin
g around his neck.

  Four years of astronaut training, three six-month tours aboard the ISS, five years flying the F-22, two years of pilot and fighter training, and four years at the Blue Zoo made him react without thinking—the one thing he’d mastered after years of preparation for this one instant in time that would affect nearly every one of the seven-plus billion people on Earth.

  For the first time in history, he killed a live video feed to the public being beamed from space, immediately after Vasilev was murdered. No way in hell was he going to give these terrorists any publicity by showing ISS personnel being slaughtered.

  Broadcasting over NASA TV, Roscosmos, the Space Channel, and other channels picked up by every major network in the world, the public feed of the live coverage from the International Space Station suddenly went dead. Channel screens went dark and nothing, not even a sign apologizing for the inconvenience, appeared on the networks.

  But the feed was still being broadcast over NASA’s closed channel, and he knew that every person in the U.S. government would instantly start working to help any way they could.

  And the media went apeshit. Especially after just seeing Zel’dovich’s dead body and witnessing the brutal slaying of an ISS crew member.

  Scott didn’t ponder the public relations crisis that might erupt from NASA’s press dweebs, and he didn’t wring his hands over the possible—and now, certainly probable—exponential drop in funding the space program would see from irate congressmen. He couldn’t care less; it was the last thing on his mind, as it should be. He was one of the last, true astronaut fighter pilots NASA still employed in the dwindling astronaut corps, and like the rest of the astronauts, he had been trained not to react but to anticipate, to stop the problem, fix it, and ensure that it didn’t happen again before it erupted into anything big.

  Every person in the room manning the communications consoles that oversaw space station operations, their sensors and data feeds, was among the most highly qualified people in the world. They just didn’t get better than this. Even after years of neglect, the space program still attracted the world’s top talent.

  And Scott wouldn’t want anyone less qualified in the communications center, either with him here on the ground or if it was him up on the ISS, undergoing what the American and Russian crew was experiencing … as Kimberly Hassid-Robinson was now.

  And that escalated the stakes even higher, because he and the people in this room weren’t only trying to assist the ISS crew to survive whatever-the-hell the whole world had just seen; now it was personal, as far as Scott was concerned.

  But as good as everyone on the floor was, he was still the only person who’d recently been to space. That gave him the creds to pull off what he’d just done—and they still had comm with the station through their closed link.

  But seconds later, the remaining NASA-only comm channels with the ISS blinked off, as if someone on the ISS had killed the emergency visual and voice links streaming from the station.

  The noise level in the room was approaching that of a jet taking off on afterburners. Everyone was standing, yelling into their throat mikes as they stretched the wires from their headphones as far as they could reach, gesticulating to unseen listeners, turning to their neighbors and trying to yell over the escalating noise.

  For some reason Flight, the ISS Flight Director, wasn’t taking control and trying to focus everyone back on helping the astronauts and cosmonauts on board. Scott realized this was Flight’s first solo and the poor kid was badly rattled. So as today’s senior astronaut liaison serving as CAPCOM, Scott needed to take the bull by the balls.

  He yanked off his headphones, kicked the black, government-issue swivel chair out of his way, and climbed up onto the console. He started clapping his hands and yelling as loudly as he could, “Hold it! Stop! Quiet down!”

  He kept clapping, now and then pointing to a person to silence her neighbor so they could all focus their attention on him. Someone bolted from the control center, leaving their post. Within seconds the noise in the room dopplered down considerably, although a few people still gabbled on excitedly. The chamber was quiet enough for Scott to speak, not in a shriek but in a strong, measured tone designed to let people know he was in charge and get them to listen to him.

  Now that the command center was quiet, Scott held his hands over his head and said firmly, “Listen up! Everyone in here knows Zel’dovich and Vasilev are dead, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Now that the ISS’s comm links have been cut, we need to be trying everything we can think of to contact our people on the station. Everything.

  “You know what that means. We need creative solutions on overriding the blackout. We need innovative ways to contact the crew and let them know that we’re actively looking for solutions. The main thing is to keep focused on contacting our folks and figuring out what happened—by any means possible. Monitor the onboard sensors, the experiments, anything that may give us a clue as to what’s going on and what happened. Understand?”

  The comm techs exchanged glances with one another; some turned to get back to their consoles. Others looked uncertain; they needed additional encouragement.

  “All right,” Scott boomed. “Get on it. Help our folks. They’re depending on us. Now move it!”

  The room was almost silent now, except for the sounds of the technicians returning to their consoles. Scott waited a few heartbeats, scanning the room until he was satisfied that everyone had a grip on their emotions.

  Then he hopped down from the console and looked around the room for Flight. The rookie Flight Director was still sitting at his console; his face was flushed as his fingers slid across his touchscreen. It was his first time as flight director and the poor kid was shocked, numb. Scott realized he’d have to stay in charge, at least for the time being.

  Scott felt his stomach tightening. It was always this way after a pressure situation, from his first F-22 flight and his first combat emergency, to being accepted for the astronaut corps. Even with his first flight in the manned version of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to the ISS.

  But this time he knew the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach wasn’t from the pep talk he’d just given; it was from wondering if Kimberly was still alive.

  For as bad as things had gotten before the divorce, the one thing he realized after it was how big a jerk he’d been, bringing the whole fighter pilot, astronaut machismo pose into the marriage. You should have checked it at the door, asshole, he berated himself. For once he was single again and back on the street he realized how shallow he—and the lifestyle he’d led before he’d gotten married—had been. Especially since it took so long for him to accept that Kimberly now commanded the ISS, a position he’d recently had himself; it had shocked him to think that a scientist could ever have the same coolheaded, no-nonsense skills needed in pressure situations, but like it or not, his ex-wife was in the hot seat now, and there was nothing he could do to help her.

  He walked to the Flight Director’s desk. The man had his head down, staring at his console, looking overwhelmed. Scott hesitated, and then put a hand on his shoulder. When he didn’t acknowledge, Scott leaned over and whispered, “Pull it together.”

  Flight nodded, but still didn’t respond.

  Scott returned to his monitor and put his headphones back on. He knew that the others in the room would be trying every channel, every data port, every other entry portal into the ISS, so his trying to call the station as CAPCOM wouldn’t make any difference at this point.

  He needed to call the NASA Administrator right away. He knew he couldn’t trust that the Administrator had been told about the emergency just yet. He knew she was a busy lady and even though she was a former astronaut herself, Patricia Simone didn’t have enough time in her crowded schedule to be continuously watching NASA TV. He knew her staff should have gotten to her and immediately brought her up to speed on the situation, but he himself had to actively close the loop and make sure she’d heard.

  JOHN
SON SPACE CENTER, ISS CONTROL CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Sophia Flores bolted up from behind her Public Affairs Officer console, shocked as she and the mission controllers saw Farid cruelly twist Vasilev’s head. The young PAO gaped at the oversized screen, barely believing what she saw.

  Blood foamed from Vasilev’s mouth as he and Farid floated out of the camera’s view—and Sophia kicked into high gear.

  Her public affairs training overwhelmed her shock, crashing through the numbness brought on by the brutal attack. Her PAO classes had thrown scenario after scenario at her in realistic simulations with the press and in the mission control center, drilling her to expect the unexpected, so she’d remain calm and not frighten the public.

  She immediately checked the NASA TV link being fed to the public. Good, it had been severed. JSC and HQ would clean up the public fallout.

  And there would be incredible fallout with this … brutality broadcast all over the world.

  Turning, she squinted up at the glass-enclosed viewing area that overlooked the floor of the control center. She saw hands pressed against the glass, mouths open in amazement. Sophia yelled up at the overlook and waved for the senior PAO accompanying the VIPs to get them out of the viewing area—now! No one moved or paid her any attention as an uproar reverberated throughout the control center.

  She stood on her tiptoes and tried to see into the darkened overlook. Where in the world is the senior PAO?