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CHAPTER 50

Low Earth Orbit

International Space Station

Tuesday

7:49 a.m. Eastern Time


Vladimir and Michael had worked on the interior of the ISS for most of the night, getting power to the systems they needed power to. The DSIHM came on line very quickly. With a few modifications to the door they had pulled, they managed to keep the hotel pressurized. They had gotten power to the main Quest Airlock module and could use it to lock in and out through the station as they needed. Jebidiah had continued working in connection with Keenan on Earth to set the launcher systems in place. Around five in the morning he had locked through to take a nap. The three of them had taken a three-hour sleep cycle and were starting to get their day back on schedule. They had no idea how the Americans or the Russians would respond, but one thing they did know is that they would respond in some form. It might take them a day or two or more, but they would respond. There was a race against the clock right now and the three of them knew that.

“We have the life support systems now functioning and the main airlock. Lighting works in Node 3 and in the Russian wing.” Vladimir ticked through his list of things to do. “J, you should have full power to the interfaces on the DSIHM exterior.”

“Yeah, I saw that come on in the virtual dashboard. I had hooked the command line in before the sleep cycle.” Jebidiah pulled the space suit in place and then adjusted the gloves. The Dorman suits were so much easier to get in and out of than the Orlan suits that hung in his way. He did a pressure check and his suit read that it was sealed. The three-dimensional icon in his virtual view showed the suit was fully functional and ready to go.

“You good?” Vladimir tapped at his helmet visor and looked in at him.

“Good.” Jeb gave him a thumbs-up and proceeded through the airlock door into the outer lock. “Time to go to work.”

“Good. Let me know if you need help,” Vladimir said. “But I have to calculate and adjust our orbit for the first target. Michael will be ready to help you soon once we finish pulling the power line from the Service Module to the DSIHM.”

“Is the propulsion module running yet?”

“Fortunately for us, they are Russian made.” Vladimir grinned. “They still work.”

“Right.”

“V, that’s two of the warheads bolted into place. Four to go. The other four are free-floating in the capsule waiting to be connected. I’m going to take a break from loading the warheads and check in with K on the communications and software uplink,” Jebidiah said on their open channel. He looked at the clock in his head. He’d been at it for almost two hours nonstop. At this rate it would take a full day to get all of the warheads in place. He hoped it would go faster once Michael and Vladimir came out to help.

“Copy that, J. We are almost in control of the Service Module systems and will be getting that wired to the DSIHM for uplink soon.”

“How soon do you think you’ll have that up?”

“Five minutes, so smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, as the Americans say.”

“Nobody says that,” Michael added.

“Okay, I’ll wait five and then I’ll connect with K.” Jebidiah looked down at the Earth underneath him. “I haven’t had a chance to enjoy the view yet anyway.”

Jebidiah found a spot on the nadir-facing side of the DSIHM and relaxed for a moment. He tethered to a handhold only a meter or so from where the next warhead would be mounted. Davidson and Schwab and the rest of the team had done an amazing job designing and developing the hotel slash EMP storage capacitor slash nuclear reentry vehicle launch pad. There were panels on the nadir side of it that, once pulled, were a perfect match interface for the glide-body structure Sing and Stinson had designed. Each one snapped into place with six breakaway bolts and two umbilicals. The two wired connections were for power for the ignition sequence and for computer connectivity up until launch. The target location for each glide body could be updated right up until ignition of the deorbit rocket motors.

“What a view,” Jeb said out loud. “You guys really should get out here and see this.”

“Michael, my friend, how is the nausea?” Vladimir asked as he pulled himself into the Russian Service Module. Michael had started getting sick and was forced to use the motion sickness app in the Dorman glasses to overcome it.

“V, you know better than to use names.”

“Who will hear us up here?” Vladimir laughed. “We are quite alone, comrade!”

“The walls might have ears.”

“Very well, then. But I say it doesn’t matter. They know who I am by now,” Vladimir said. “I might even be the world’s most wanted.”

“You can be certain of that,” Michael said. “But I prefer anonymity.”

“Yes, and boring, as I recall.” Vladimir laughed. Then he gave him the large umbilical they had hardwired into the Service Module dashboard panel and wrapped a service loop of the three-centimeter-thick cable around one of the handhold bars. “Can you spool this to the hotel main power block panel?”

“Got it.” Michael gathered the cable in front of him and started rolling out line and pushing the spool forward as it floated in front of him. “Once you get it there you know what to do. Then we need to give J a third hand.”

“Got it, V.” Michael pushed at the wire spool and it unwound into the FGB.

“K, do you have the command data feed showing active?” Jebidiah asked over the encrypted audio line he had connected through the ISS satellite uplink. Keenan answered directly from his computer desk in his island refuge.

“Yeah, J. I have it. If you’ll plug one of the specials in, I should be able to shake hands with it.”

“We’re probably still a couple hours away from that. M and V have some more work to do inside before they can get out here with me. How are we looking on our timeline?” Jebidiah did a hand-over-hand walk using the exterior handholds on the DSIHM. Once he reached the umbilical command line plugged into the panel built into the hotel structure, he looked at the readout panel. “K, the panel is showing you are still routing through the Vyrezka. Are you ready to shift to the ISS feed yet?”

“I am, but what I’m showing is that you are not,” Keenan replied.

“Hold on a minute,” Jebidiah said and toggled the channel over to the Vyrezka team channel. “M, I need that power bus line from the Service Module connected before K and I can move forward. You have an ETA on that?”

“Uh, yeah, I just pulled the line through the BEAM and entering the DSIHM now. Give me a minute and I’ll get you the power feed.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Jebidiah toggled the channel back to Keenan. “M is doing that now. Any minute now.”

Suddenly the readout panel showed data traffic and there was a high-bandwidth connection. The computers of the Russian Service Module were now being routed through the DSIHM system and it wouldn’t take Keenan even seconds to overwrite and control them. Especially since he had already uploaded hidden code in the flight software through their Huntsville connection months prior.

“Got it, J! Hold on…and…BINGO! The ISS is online and ours.” Keenan cheered. “V should be able to control the propulsion modules now.”

“Good news. I’ll pass that a—” Jebidiah stopped midsentence as a strange shiny field of what looked like fireflies sparkled around him in the glinting sunlight. He waved his right glove through the cloud of particles but wasn’t sure what to make of them.

“J, what’s going on?”

“Hold on…there’s something we…son of a bitch!” The panel next to him suddenly had several holes appear in it and some of the MLI blanket material sprayed upward as if it had been hit by a micrometeorite. Something hit the torso of his suit hard but didn’t penetrate the armor. Jeb turned to look behind him.

“Shit! I think I missed!” Allison said over the radio link between her and Nolvany’s suits.

She reacquired her handhold on the fire extinguisher and adjusted her course. Then she let a long spray from one of them go directly at the man in the space suit on the back of the hotel module. The cloud dispersed around him in a shiny spray of ice particles and skittered about like fireflies until they boiled away to nothing. Nolvany fired his extinguisher, speeding him in the direction of the man even faster. Just as he hit feetfirst, he fired the shotgun taped to his wrist, hitting the man square in the chest. The shotgun pellets ricocheted off of the tan-colored breastplate in all directions.

“Their suits are bulletproof armor!” Nolvany shouted. “You must shoot at soft spots, Major! Maybe the legs!”

Allison had slowed her descent to the ISS to a near stop and tried to take aim. Nolvany had become entangled and twisted up with the other astronaut and they were spiraling in a whirling ball of arms and legs and helmets across the top of the DSIHM until they broke free from the module, drifted a few tens of meters of open space, and then slammed hard into one of the Russian solar panel arrays. Vasiliy didn’t bother to scramble for a handhold. Instead, he fired the extinguisher, pushing him away from the other astronaut, hoping to given him room to target the man again. He fired one of his arm guns but must have missed or hit the man’s armored sections. Allison wasn’t sure where the shot went. She did her best to aim for a clear shot at the enemy astronaut, but they were moving too erratically relative to her motion for her to target him. Once it looked like Vasiliy was free and clear, unexpectedly, the other man’s suit fired multiple jets, stabilizing him almost instantly. That was something that neither the NASA nor the Russian suits couldn’t do. He reached to his chest and pulled a device that appeared to be magnetically stuck there. The device looked almost like a giant water pistol with a steel barrel, and it could only be one thing—a firearm designed for space combat in a space suit.

“Vasiliy, look out! He’s got a gun!” Allison aimed for his head and let the trigger to her shotgun go. She hit the man with multiple pellets and some solar panel surface material shattered and scattered behind him. The motion the gun imparted to her was minimal and as their calculations had suggested were basically undetectable. But the flailing about, trying to get a shot, imparted unusual angular rotations to her that she had to dampen out with the fire extinguisher. While her shot had hit home, they had yet to penetrate the man’s space suit and he continued to draw his bead on Major Vasiliy Nolvany. Nolvany fired his left gun again as he jetted sideways with respect to the man. Then a bright green laser dot hit dead center of Nolvany’s chest and the man fired his odd-looking weapon. Suddenly, Vasiliy’s suit decompressed and bright red spheroids of blood boiled out from holes in the front and back of his suit, almost fluorescing as the sunlight hit them. The air from within the suit sprayed out from both holes until his oxygen supply was drained.

“No!” Allison shouted. “Nolvany!”

“Ugh…flare…” were his last words.

Allison knew exactly what he was telling her. She fired her extinguisher, putting her on a path toward the astronaut assailant, and took aim with the third barrel of the shotgun. The man turned to face her, bringing his laser sight toward her. It panned across her helmet briefly but not before she had taken aim and pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

The third barrel had been loaded with a potassium perchlorate flare just in case they were going to have to burn through something on the station. They had been in the survival kit because, well, flares are in survival kits. There had been many cases in the past where Soyuz crews had landed in the wilderness and had to be found. Back then, flares came in handy. Then there had been those few years where the politicians had managed to keep even the Russians from bringing the weapons to space. But a few years following that decision there was a Soyuz mission that had been lost for days and the Russians had rethought the silly American politics and put the weapons back in the capsules. At the moment, Allison was very glad they had and was rethinking her politics on the subject as well.

Bright white and slightly red potassium perchlorate fire stuck to the faceplate of the man’s helmet when it hit. The stellar-hot fire melted through it and straight into the man’s face as his suit ruptured and decompressed. Bright orange flames briefly flared within the suit as the oxygen was burned up. If the flare hadn’t killed him, and the exploding oxygen-rich fire inside the suit hadn’t killed him, then he would most certainly be dead from exposure to space vacuum before long. The man was dead. Nolvany was dead.

They were both dead. There was nothing she could do for either of them. And Allison suspected the assailant had somehow communicated with his friends that she was out there. She quickly fired her extinguisher toward Nolvany and grabbed his fire extinguishers. She snapped them to her torso harness and let them go. Then she dug through his pouch and grabbed the pistol he had placed there. She didn’t have time to untape the shotguns on his arms. She hated leaving him, but she also knew she didn’t have much time. She started to jet away but then had a thought.

She let a spray go on her extinguisher to push her toward the assailant. There he was, floating dead. More than half of his face was gone. It was a gruesome, sickening, smoldering sight. Combat was dreadful, as Nolvany had warned her. The flare was still giving off a faint glow deep inside the boiling and freezing blood inside his helmet and inside his skull. She had to look away, it was so grotesque. She did her best not to let herself gag in the suit. That would be bad. She traced her hands over him to his hand and looked at the weapon that he still clutched tightly. She examined how it worked and decided she could use it.

Allison pried the space-suit combat gun from his grip, realizing it was magnetically held there. When it was free of the magnetic attraction it was easy to manage and clearly the trigger mechanism had been designed for space-suit gloves. She wondered if this was what Nolvany might have come up with had he been the designer. With a quick kick off of the solar panel nearest her and a few short blasts from her last full extinguisher, she jetted for the far end of the truss structure near the P6 Integrated Truss Structure on the port side, uncertain of what she should do next. But she needed a moment to gather her wits and develop a plan. She checked the suit vital sign monitor, which told her that her heart rate was at 170 beats per minute and her blood pressure was high.

“No shit.” She whispered to herself as if someone might overhear her. She tried to slow her breathing and calm herself. “Damn it! Nolvany. What do I need to do?”

She first mentally checked her inventory. Her last remaining extinguisher was probably three quarters full at this point. She had Nolvany’s two extinguishers. She had two pistols and the new gun she had taken. Her triple barrel was empty and she didn’t think she could untape it, reload it, and tape it back during the EVA. She had enough air to stay in the suit for days, but that would truly suck. She really really needed a plan.

Allison looked around the ISS from her vantage point, trying to get an idea as to what she could do. She had taken out one of the assailants, but at the huge cost of Nolvany. She could always tuck her tail and run back to the Soyuz that was parked three and half kilometers away. She still had enough extinguisher to make the nearly thirty-minute trip.

Suddenly, one of the propulsion thrusters on the Russian segment fired and that made her decision for her. If she stayed on the ISS now, and they continued to fire off the thrusters adjusting the orbit, she likely wouldn’t be able to make it back to the Soyuz depending on what type of orbit correction burns they were making. She also knew that she couldn’t just let them fire off those nukes. Then a glint of light off the tethered space capsule flashed across her line of sight, flash-blinding her briefly. That gave her an idea. She probably had minutes at best before it would be too late, assuming they were planning other burns. And she probably had less than ten minutes before some of the assailant astronaut’s pals could cycle through the airlock to come out to her. If she hurried, she might get lucky.

Allison aimed herself at the capsule and fired one of the fire extinguishers in the opposite direction and held on for a bit longer than she probably should have. She gained in speed, zooming quickly toward the end of the BEAM and DSIHM and the tethered vessel. She hit a braking thrust in front of her, saturating her vision briefly from the glare off the ice particles like bright headlights in a fog bank, as she passed through the cloud. Then the capsule rushed up at her. She hit feetfirst and then sprawled belly forward into a face-plant. Her suit skittered and scraped across the surface until one of the tethered extinguishers became entangled and jerked the cable taut, yanking her to an abrupt stop.

Allison caught her breath for a brief moment and then set about untangling the extinguisher tether. She ended up having to disconnect the carabiner and feed it through a knot and then she was free. She reconnected it and worked her way around the capsule to the open hatch. Above the opening she could see a name painted in black that looked Russian.

“Vye-rezzzz-ka,” she enunciated. “Hmm. Sounds Russian.”

Once she popped her head in it was pretty obvious that the capsule design had been stolen from the Blue Origin spacecraft design, though with some unusual modifications. And floating there in front of her were four tethered charcoal gray, carbon-spun-fiber-composite reentry vehicle glide bodies.

“Jackpot!”

Allison examined them closer and knew they could only be one thing—nuclear warhead reentry vehicles. She quickly traced the lead to where it was connected and popped the release mechanism. It was a simple spring-loaded metal carabiner. She snapped that to her torso and then began feeding the mass of entangled cables and tethers snapped about her waist and torso through the hatch. As soon as she was clear of any structures that could ensnare her, she fired her extinguisher in a direction that would push her toward the Soyuz. She thought about the extra mass of the four reentry glide bodies and how much that would slow her down. She just had to overcome the inertia and get moving. It would be a longer trip back than it had been on the way here, but she would make it.


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