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CHAPTER 41

Low Earth Orbit

International Space Station

Monday

7:55 p.m. Eastern Time


Allison remembered an alarm going off and then she had heard a loud pop in one of the modules distant from her. She felt the hair on her head stand straight out and that was it. Well, she did recall feeling like somebody had suddenly hit her with a truck. And that was it. There was nothing but blackness after that. Then she could suddenly feel her entire body as if it were a cracked tooth with aluminum foil and ice touching the raw nerve. She tried to move her body, but there was only the pain. Then she heard another sound. This time instead of the popping sound it was more of a sizzle like bacon frying in a pan. But the smell wasn’t bacon. A strong, pungent, toxic chemical odor burned her nostrils and she could feel searing heat on one side of her face. The smell forced its way down her throat into her lungs, forcing her to gag and cough.

Allison forced herself to open her eyes. When she did, she almost panicked. Almost. There was a monster only a couple of meters from her, flailing about. It was blue and spheroidal at the central body, radiating immense heat. It had one long more orange tentacle swooshing away from her as if it hadn’t seen her. Again, Allison almost panicked.

“What the f—” She stopped midsentence from the knock against the back of her head as she floated into an equipment rack nearest the viewing port. A smoldering laptop there dug into the side of her neck. “Ouch! Shit!”

Allison squinted and tried to clear her mind as she grabbed for a handhold. Whatever it was she had grabbed was so hot it seared to her hand. She quickly jerked away, shouting in pain. Then suddenly, maybe because of the pain, or direness of her situation, or her training, or the fact that she had finally become fully conscious again, suddenly, for whatever reason, she regained her wits and realized what was going on.

“I was unconscious,” she said out loud. “The station is on fire!”

The large blue flame floating above the main control panel in the U.S. Lab Module was growing and looming closer to her—or she was floating closer to it. She wasn’t certain. There was airflow coming from somewhere. That airflow was something Allison couldn’t understand at the moment. The power was out. There were only the backup battery–powered emergency lights making light other than the fire. None of the systems in sight showed any signs of functionality. As far as she knew, there wasn’t a single system functioning currently anywhere on the ISS and that included the air handling system. But there was light right in front of her. There was the nearly two-meter-diameter blue ball with the orange dendritic-looking extension jutting out across the room in front of her, burning away at anything it touched. One of the main things she recalled from fire training was that in microgravity fire doesn’t spread about like on Earth because there is no buoyancy to make the hot air rise upward and spread. With no “up” direction in space, fire typically had to stay put and burn in an oxygen-sucking blue ball of flame. But past experiments and fires on the Russian Mir Space Station had shown that airflow into and around the fireball would extend the flames in the direction of flow, enabling it to spread. And currently, this fire had a spreading tentacle of orange flickering flame following some air flowing from somewhere or maybe to somewhere.

It was difficult seeing through the smoke that just sort of hung around with a vortex whirling slowly with the orange tentacle. The light in the room was a confusing mess now almost like a dance club was the hovering blue ball of flame pulsed slowly, consuming the air within it, the flickering tendril of orange whipping about, and the battery-powered safety light flickering through the smoke. The blue fireball with the single tentacle wavered abruptly and turned almost violently making it appear as if it were an odd-looking space unipus from an old science fiction movie from the previous millennium that was coming to eat her.

Crackle, crackle. Pop!

The flame tendril engulfed one of the experiment racks and the battery-powered safety light nearest it. That hadn’t been good. The battery deflagrated, throwing shrapnel into the bulkhead and kept bouncing about until something stopped it. One such something had been Allison’s left calf muscle. The shrapnel hit her with so much force that she spun wildly, arms and legs akimbo, head over heels. She did as best she could to spread her arms and legs wide to reduce her angular momentum until she slammed against the opposite bulkhead into another smoldering equipment rack. Fortunately, it wasn’t searing hot. She grabbed and steadied herself. Then she looked at her leg where the pain was. She wasn’t certain, because of the odd lighting in the room now only from the fire, but she thought she could see a red blotch forming on her pants. To top that off, the burning battery, plastics, and other materials were throwing off putrid and suffocating fumes throughout the room. Allison coughed and wheezed, doing her best to keep clear of the flames and cover her mouth with her T-shirt at the same time.

“Anybody on the other side of that thing?!” she shouted.

“I’m here, comrade! Nolvany!” the major shouted over the battery-backed-up fire alarms. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, I think so. A little shaken up,” Allison said.

“I can’t see you through this!”

There were flickering lights behind her and then there was another muted explosion, perhaps just a deflagration, of another safety light battery system. She could hear someone shouting “Fire! Fire! We’ve got casualties! Can anybody hear me?” behind her from one of the other modules. It was Commander Yancy’s voice.

“Nolvany! Do you have eyes on the fire extinguisher?” she asked. “And the safety breathing equipment?”

“Have the extinguisher in hand!” he said and then Allison could hear hissing as he sprayed it.

“Great! I’m backing as far across as I can and to the RAM direction side of the module! Hit the flame!” she shouted. “It’s growing fast!”

Allison heard the hissing and spraying sound again. There was water-based foam suddenly hitting the center of the blue ball of flame. It was an extinguisher from the Russian module. The ones from the other modules were carbon dioxide based.

“Stay back, Major Simms!” Vasiliy Nolvany continued to spray and approach closer as the fire was suppressed to something less monsterlike. The orange tentacle from the fiery unipus shrunk as it whipped back and forth with whatever air current was still flowing until it shrank to a tiny string and then it withered and died.

“What has happened?” Nolvany used a short jet of the distorted beach ball–sized orange stretched spherical or ellipsoidal solid–shaped extinguisher. “All of the systems are out and there are fires on almost all the modules, I think. The Russian modules are all out of power completely but with less damage, I think. It looks the same here, just more fire and damage.”

“I don’t know. Must have been some sort of catastrophic failure somewhere. But first things first!” Allison said. “How do you know there are fires in most modules?”

“From the shouts, Major Simms.” He shone his flashlight up and down her body, stopping at her leg. “You are hurt, Major. Do you know how badly?”

“No, it just happened when the damned battery pack exploded. Or, well, I’m more worried about the concussion I think I have from whatever knocked me out. I came to just in time for that damned battery pack to blow,” she said. Allison raised her leg closer toward her and inspected the tear in her pants. She pulled her pants open, making the rip large enough to see a long sliver of something metallic sticking out. “Shit.”

“Yes, Major,” Nolvany agreed with her assessment. “Do not remove it, unless it is too painful.”

“No, you’re right. Let’s fight these fires first. I’m not bleeding out, it doesn’t appear. And I don’t think it is by any major arteries. I’ll get it out and bandaged later. We need to figure out where this air is flowing from. Or to. That isn’t a good sign.”

“I was thinking the same thing. The air handlers are down, so why is there flow that is fast enough to cause a flame like that? I can feel it on my face.” He touched his face and held up his hand trying to follow the air current.

“Okay, you go against the flow,” Allison said, pointing back in the opposite direction than she was facing. Her nostrils, mouth, throat, and lungs burned from the fumes and smoke. “I’ll go with the flow. We’ll see if something is blowing or if something is sucking.”

“Very good, Major,” Nolvany agreed. “But be careful.”

“Right. Careful.”

Allison gently kicked off the wall with her right leg, being careful not to aggravate the metal sliver sticking out of her left one. She stopped at an equipment rack and found a flashlight that was magnetically stuck to the edge of it. She tugged it free and flipped it on. It worked. Using the flashlight, she searched the rack for the emergency Portable Breathing Apparatus. She found a couple PBAs, flipped one on, and slipped it over her face. She placed an extra one on her hip just in case she came across someone in need. There were others still in the rack in case somebody came along looking for one.

She flipped the system on and started breathing. The cool, fresh air flowed onto her face and some of the burning in her lungs subsided. She then rolled over with her back now facing the Earth side and looked at the wall of the module where the air seemed to be pulling or pushing the smoke. She followed along with it into the connector to Node 2 and could feel tremendous heat. She grabbed at a handhold along one of the bulkheads to stop her motion. And did her best to contort her neck about so she could see in the direction she was floating.

“Oh, hell,” she said and then she scrambled for the fire extinguisher in that module. She finally found it and released it from its mount and pulled the pin. She kicked instinctively off the wall realizing that she had used her left leg once a shooting pain jetted up her body. She also thought she could feel more wetness around the wound, suggesting that the blood was seeping out worse now. Had it been a serious artery she’d have seen blood squirting out, most likely, because there was no gravity to pull it down her leg and the pants surrounding it had been torn free. The only thing holding it to her body was viscosity, polar liquid sticking to her, her tattered pants material absorbing some of it, and the fact that it wasn’t a gushing wound. But if she kept moving that piece of shrapnel about it might tear a larger hole in something more important.

“Damn it!” She grimaced in pain briefly and then did her best to recompose herself. She tore a bit from her T-shirt and gently wrapped the wound, trying to stabilize the shrapnel. She took a deep breath and then focused on the problem at hand as best she could. The ISS was on fire in multiple locations and there was air flowing to or from somewhere, which meant there was a leak. Something was either leaking into the cabin or out of the cabin. Neither one of those would be good scenarios. If it was leaking out, they were losing air. If it was leaking in, that meant a propellant, fumes from a fire elsewhere, or who knew? It would just be bad and must be stopped.

She managed to get her right hand on a bulkhead between two racks and gripped it. She then pushed hard enough to sling herself in the direction of the immense heat. Allison worked her body upright in the direction of travel using her abdominal muscles to crunch her feet in and then to stretch orthogonally to her direction of flight. She hugged the fire extinguisher against her chest at the ready.

As she entered through Node 2 and into the interface of the Japanese Experiment Module, she felt such intense heat that she feared she had burns on her body. Instantly she fired the extinguisher. The spray acted as a rocket pack and stopped her forward motion slowly and then began pushing her backward. She managed to stop herself with both feet against an equipment rack, again throwing sharp shooting pains up her left leg. Allison ignored the pain and braced herself to fire the extinguisher again.

Just inside the hatchway to the JEM she could see a large blue ball of flame with multiple tentacles of multicolored fire slinging about and burning into the cabinets, equipment, wiring, and pretty much everything there. She sprayed the carbon dioxide liquid into the blue and orange beast, doing her best to fight against the thrust created as she did. The white icy spray particles spread about barely caused the fiery monster to flicker, but the thrust twisted her about in the microgravity randomly like she was trying to hold onto a greased hairless pig.

She didn’t stop spraying until the heat on her bare skin backed off enough that she could move closer to the door. Once she was close enough to the module’s hatchway, she sprayed a panel to the right of it to cool it some. The white icy spray sizzled as it stuck to the gray metal panel and melted, sublimating instantly to carbon dioxide vapors. Then she removed what was left of her torn, sweaty, and soot-covered T-shirt and wrapped it around her hands, letting the extinguisher float next her freely. As she tied the shirt to her right hand, she could feel a sting from the burns on her palm and fingers. She had to ignore that for now and push on.

Allison stabilized her motion against the entryway by holding on with both hands to the opening, which from her reference frame was just above her head. Once she was sure she wasn’t going to spin free into the multi-tentacled monster in the JEM, she let go of the hatchway and grabbed at the hatch itself. Making certain she had a good purchase on the hatch she then pulled at it, using the mass of the door to alter her body position, swinging her legs inward against the bulkhead to give her leverage until she had something to push and pull against. The door slid into place. Allison worked the manual hatch locks and then pulled the lever inside the panel that then revealed the completely manual system that could open just that specific module to the vacuum of space through a small exhaust path.

While she didn’t really have time to think about it, she did notice that the smoke flow had stopped once she had closed the hatch. That meant there was a leak in the JEM that was venting precious air into space already. Eventually, the JEM fire would lose air and burn itself out as the air pressure leaked down. She didn’t want to wait that long, so, she worked the manual controls and interlocks until she could pull the right sequence of levers. The controls were built into each of the modules as part of the fire safety procedures and had been part of all of their training before leaving Earth. The sequence of interlocks was pulled and then she released the lever. She could feel the mechanical release through it. The air and smoke and fire in the room quickly dissipated and was out.

“Whew!” She wiped the sweat on her forehead and suddenly felt very tired. Shouts from somewhere else down the line of nodes brought her attention back to the current problem. As Nolvany had told her, he believed that most of the modules were on fire.

“One down.” Allison pulled the extinguisher back to her body and rolled it about until she could see the gauge on top. It was still half full. “Good enough for now.”

Allison turned with the intent to start from that end of the ISS and work her way to the other. She kicked against the hatch door instinctively without thinking, using both legs. A sharp pain fired up her left leg.

“Son of a bitch! That hurts!” she said through gritted teeth.

“Son of a bitch! That hurts!”

“I know. I can see it must. Hold still and I’ll see if we can find something to splint it.” U.S. Space Force Captain Tom Alexander scanned the Cupola for something, anything to splint Dr. Denton’s compound-fractured arm. But the Cupola module was small, designed for viewing nadir at the Earth and seeing outside to control the large robotic arm. It wasn’t a hospital or a storage compartment. There was little available other than camera lenses, a laptop, about a fifteen-centimeter-long flashlight, a few ink pens, various battery supplies for several cameras, cameras, and a shit-ton of Velcro stuck to every damned thing. But little that a person could use for a splint.

“My head really hurts, Tom.” NASA astronaut Dr. Lawrence Denton was beginning to tremble. Tom knew it wasn’t cold in there. Hell, it was probably thirty degrees Celsius or hotter. Had he not closed the door to the Cupola Module when he had, it would have been a lot hotter than it was currently. He could still see the flame flickering through the window in the hatch. There was a fire on the other side of that door.

“Look at me, Larry.” Tom pulled the little flashlight from where it was stuck to the bulkhead and moved the light back and forth over his pupils. There was almost no response. Denton was going into shock. He needed medical attention now, but that wasn’t coming anytime soon. He sort of jerked suddenly and Tom was afraid he was going to go into convulsions. But both fortunately and unfortunately, he moved his broken arm, sending pain through him that focused his mind on that. He screamed in pain.

“Jesus Christ, my arm!”

Tom did his best to hold him steady and looked at his arm more closely. It was turning reds, blues, and purples. There was plenty of light in the Cupola for now as they were currently on the dayside of the planet. Just outside the window, it seemed like only meters away, he could see the Soyuz capsule docked in place with the black multilayer insulation blankets diffusing the sunlight and Earthlight back at him. The spacecraft seemed no worse for the wear. Whatever had happened didn’t appear to have damaged it. He hoped. The Soyuz capsules were their lifeboats. There were only three attached to the ISS currently, which meant they had lifeboats for nine. There were seven total humans onboard presently. That was the good news.

“Okay, we have to splint this to keep you from moving it,” Tom said to Denton, but wasn’t certain he was coherent enough to understand him.

Tom looked about the Cupola for more things he might use as he grabbed one of the blue handhold bars placed all around the periphery of the windows, hatches, and racks throughout the ISS. One of the blue metal bars only had two socket-head cap bolts holding it in place, one at either end. There was nothing attached to the bar other than a quick-release camera mount. Tom rummaged through the brown canvas camera pouch just beside the intercom unit. There wasn’t an Allen wrench there but there was a shiny metal multitool. He quickly extended the pliers attachment and went to work on the bolts. He managed to break the first one loose and then worked it the rest of the way out with his fingers, placing the bolt back in the hole it had come from. He worked the second one until he had the blue metal bar free. He disconnected the camera mount and secured it to one of the other blue bars.

He looked around some more and found the light blue hand cloth stuffed inside a cubby just above the robot arm controls that they often used to clean the windows with. Tom unfolded the blue cloth and then used the multitool knife blade to cut it into strips. He managed to get several strips about three centimeters or so wide and about a half meter long each out of the cloth. That would do.

“Hold still and let me put this on you,” he said, looking Dr. Denton in the eyes. Denton seemed to calm slightly but the trembling continued. Tom could see the man’s lips quivering as if he’d been out in the cold for too long.

Tom gently held the bar up next to the broken arm and let it float next to it. He quickly wrapped above the break with one of the strips of cloth. He looped it around the arm several times and then tied it like a shoelace to itself. Carefully, he repeated the process with the other two strips of cloth until the arm was immobilized. At least for the time being. He had no idea what to do for the shock the man was suffering.

“That has to be good enough for now.” He pulled the bandage tight around the makeshift splint, sliding a finger underneath it to make sure it wasn’t so tight that it cut off Denton’s circulation. The left arm below the elbow was clearly fractured, very badly. “I know it’s easier said than done, but try not to bang that into anything.”

“Thanks, Tom,” Lawrence said through gritted and chattering teeth. “If we can get to the medical bay, we can do this better.”

“Yeah, and take some pain meds. Maybe Dr. Fahid can take a look at it.” Tom was doing his best to be reassuring.

“Maybe. But I’m certain it is broken. What about you?” Lawrence asked him. Tom could tell the man clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Yes, his arm was very broken. That part was obvious from simple visual inspection.

“Me? It’s just a bump on the head.” Tom replied with a quick smile. It was just a bump on the head. At least that was what he was planning on. Tom could barely see out of his left eye as it was swollen shut. He didn’t think it was a concussion more than it was a black eye, or going to be. “Just where the camera got me when you slammed into me from whatever tossed you across the Cupola Module. I was looking through it closely and bam! The lens hit the window and I hit the camera. It hurt.”

“Sorry,” the trembling astronaut replied. “I think I was electrocuted.”

“Hey, I knew you didn’t throw yourself across the room on purpose. Something pretty serious has just happened. I think the power is out everywhere. Maybe it was a grounding problem or something, but there was a serious electrical malfunction. We need to get in touch with Huntsville.” Tom could now see orange along with the blue light coming through the tiny round window in the hatch door, but the door was so hot, getting close enough to look through the viewport was out of the question. He reached his hand up closer to the ISS Cupola Module hatch door. It was blistering hot. He pulled it back, shaking it to cool it off. “Shit, that’s hot.”

“Had you not had the presence of mind to close it quickly we might be burned alive right now,” Lawrence Denton said grimly. His body and teeth still trembling and chattering. “Now, we’ll either just die of carbon dioxide poisoning or be dry roasted like peanuts. At least we’ll die with the best view from the station.”

The Cupola Module was like a large bay window looking out from Node 3, also known as the Tranquility Node, in the nadir direction, toward Earth, with a view never before rivaled unless you were on an EVA. Well, that is, it was never rivaled until the DSIHM had been installed. Tom had to admit, it was an amazing view, but he sure as hell didn’t plan on dying looking out that damned window. But again, it was getting very hot in there and if the power was out, he wasn’t sure what that meant about the carbon dioxide scrubbers. He started doing math in his head on how long before two men created enough carbon dioxide in a given volume before it was dangerous. Since the first symptom of carbon dioxide exposure was a headache, neither of them was in a good position to test that as both of them had fairly severe head injuries at the moment.

“Die in here? No, we’re not dying in here. Okay, sure, the Tranquility Node is on fire and blocking our way out, for now. Soon, and I mean soon, somebody out there will be along to put out the fire and get us out of here,” Tom said. “Or, we’ll be clever and figure something out.”

Denton just nodded, teeth still chattering.

When whatever had happened, happened moments earlier, Royal Canadian Navy captain and ISS Mission Commander Teri Yancy had seen cosmonaut Dr. Peter Solmonov thrown hard across the room and completely out of the Tranquility Module. He banged the back of his head against the hatch into the entrance orthogonal to the main habitat module direction. She had gone to Dr. Solmonov and given him a shove forward to keep him moving away from the fire.

“We have fire! And we have casualties here!” she shouted. Then she had dove headfirst into that compartment, the Quest Airlock Module, while throwing him in front of her. Tumbling along behind him, she managed to somehow get tangled up with him and the ISS peripheral fixtures. There were cables, boxes, racks, computers, and other miscellaneous equipment jutting out from every surface on the ISS and in this case, all of that scientific space stuff hadn’t been particularly helpful.

Teri’s right hand had gotten caught in a bind between him and the square cutouts of the matte bronze colored metal ring encircling the rounded corner rectangular hatch. Her momentum had carried her forward, twisting her wrist in a direction it didn’t want to go and, she was fairly certain, the impact into the cutout had snapped several of the bones in her hand. She had actually heard the crack when she hit. Adrenaline had allowed her to overcome her mad spinning, the pain, and confusion in order to perform the lifesaving task of sliding the door closed and sealing it behind them with her remaining functional hand. The problem now was that Solmonov wasn’t breathing. That had to be corrected before she could do anything else.

“Dr. Solmonov! Can you hear me?” She breathed into his mouth, counted to three, and repeated the process as per her training. While she counted and got her breath, Teri then lightly slapped the Russian scientist across the face. She shook him with her left hand. The right one was just completely useless with the bad wrist. “Peter! Peter! Can you hear me?!”

Teri leaned in as closely as possible to the man to listen for breathing, a heartbeat, anything. There was nothing. She breathed into his mouth again. With her good hand she made a fist and slammed it against his chest, tossing her off balance spinning away.

“Damn it all to Hell!” she shouted as the added angular momentum pushed both of them in opposite directions randomly and closer to the very hot door leading back through the kitchen in Node 1 and toward the Tranquility Module. There was a bad fire in there and at the moment there was nothing she could do about it. She hoped someone else was working it.

Teri used her socked feet to hook under one of the blue metal balance bars and then she grabbed another one with her left hand to stabilize her spin. She pushed off the bulkhead and rolled in a forward tuck toward Peter’s lifelessly floating body. She opened her legs just as she approached and then locked them around his midsection, making the motion an inelastic collision transfer of momentum. They bounced into the wall. It hurt. But the end result was that Teri had Peter’s motion stabilized and they were connected, giving her a platform to work on him with.

She leaned closer to his face, listening for breathing while searching his neck with her left hand for a pulse. She couldn’t find one. She breathed into his mouth again and then banged on his chest with her left fist three times. She breathed. She used her fist again.

“Come on, Peter!” she shouted, hitting him in the chest again. “Come on! Breathe, damn it!”

Solmonov made a deep gasping for air and suddenly began to react to her. He was breathing. His heart was beating again. She sighed with relief.

“Peter, can you hear me?” He didn’t respond. “Peter?”

“Dr. Itokawa! Please listen to me!” Dr. Raheem Fahid shouted as he banged on the door for Docking Compartment 1, which was just beneath the Russian Service Module. A Progress Module was attached to Docking Compartment 1 and the Japanese astronaut had disconnected the air duct that had been stretched in there and closed the door. Raheem wasn’t sure what the man was planning, but he could tell by his voice that he was panicked and not thinking clearly. He needed to get him out of the Progress Module before he did something under duress that might have bad results.

“There’s a fire! We have to keep the compartments closed from each other!” Itokawa shouted.

“Satoshi! The fire is out here. It was only a small one and is under control,” Raheem told him. “Please open the door. There are likely others that need our help elsewhere on the station.”

“There’s no fire out there?” Itokawa asked. “Are you sure you got it? Space fires are unusual and hard to spot.”

“No. There is no fire out here now. I wouldn’t be here so calmly if it were,” Raheem said. He could suddenly feel the vibrations on the door and it pulled open. “Nice to see you are in one piece, Satoshi. Are you sure that you are alright otherwise?”

“Yes. I was not touching anything at the time it happened. I think that saved me. I was eating and then suddenly bang! There was a major electrical discharge throughout the module and everything was blown. Then there was a fire near Node 1. I moved away as quickly as possible and ended up here.”

“Looks like this was a safe spot. I don’t see as much damage here. I was in the Progress at the end of the Service Module, retrieving something for Dr. Schwab when it happened. The Russian systems seemed to have managed this event better than the rest of the station,” Raheem said. “Come on. Let us go see if we can help.”

Raheem reached in through the hatch to the Progress and gave Itokawa a hand out. He noticed three large, bright orange canvas bags fastened to the wall just inside the module. One of those was marked FIRE EXTINGUISHER in Russian. Raheem stopped and studied briefly how to unfasten it.

“This might come in handy,” he said. “We should head back the other way. The Russian modules all the way out to the Soyuz on the air lock and the Progress at the end of the Service Module things seem to be okay. There’s no power, but okay.”

“I heard a lot of shouting earlier,” Itokawa said.

“Me too,” Raheem agreed. “And it was that way. Come on. Let’s go.”


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