Breakwire by Terry Wilson (summer books .TXT) 📕

regular, but he'll check records the next morning and get back to Bill as soon as possible the next day.

The following day, Thomas wakes up and starts getting ready to come back home. It's been fourteen and a half orbits, he's still in his suit, figuring that it would be too much of a pain to get out of it and back into it for just a twenty-four hour mission, and he's returning early this morning, to, he hopes, a nice soft, precise spashdown in the middle of Sprint Pool on Merritt Island just north of Cape Canaveral, where he took off yesterday morning. 30 January 2013, and the weather is dang near perfect.

Bill comes into work, taking his place in the Malton Mission Control Room, and they prep for a routine deorbit maneuver, breakwire bypass engaged on one thruster. He's still a little nervous, but he thinks nothing of doing the deorbit maneuver using only the left main thruster, or the dreaded Backup Maneuver Motor, which is, like the Payload Escape Stage, a device of last resort. The main thrusters they had far less doubt about than these other systems, since that main thruster had flown in dozens of unmanned satellites without a glitch endangering any of them. He trusted it.

Thomas, ready as he'll ever be for deorbit, follows the slightly modified procedure, and gets the go for the deorbit maneuver. He has the bypassed breakwire circuit current on his display. The guidance program counts down to the beginning of the maneuver.

"Hey Lucy," Thomas says with a smile.

In Malton, the informal call, and especially the tone of it, makes her nervous. She bites her lip, then hits her mike switch and answers professionally, "Sprint, Malton, go ahead, Thomas."

<Give my wife my love,> Thomas' voice sighs warmly. Sandy Shinra, in the visitor's gallery, is the first to start laughing. In seconds, most of the room is laughing.

The maneuver countdown reaches zero, and the deorbit maneuver begins. The breakwire circuit's current drops straight to zero. There is static on the air among the laughter of the engineers.

Bill sees it first. "Holy crap!

" he yells in alarm, seeing red and amber lights all over his warning panel. Laughter could still be heard on the loop recording as he begins his petrified call, <Abort Abort Abort. Flight, this is Stove. Abort Abort Abort.>

Lucy snaps to attention and hits her mike switch. She is shocked at how much her own voice has changed as she squeals "Abort Abort Abort. Sprint, Malton. Abort Abort Abort. We're standing by."

There's no reply.

The room goes through a phase of nervous alarm as various engineers notice damage to their systems. Guidance and Dyna are asking each other off the loop what's happening to the thrusters. It takes about two minutes for the room to go silent. There is no communication from the spacecraft. It was lost half a second after the maneuver began. This is why the shrill ring of Bill's cell phone startles so many.

Bill pulls it out and answers, "Now's not a good-" the caller interrupts him. Bill, who was half standing, falls towards his chair, but catches only the edge, wipes out onto the floor. He says, "It's too late. We're going into contingency now, get me copies of all the," he squints his tears. Presses his mike switch records his breaking voice, <Yutran Aerospace, Sprint Mission Control. We->

Lucy presses her mike switch, the first instruction is to protect against the intrusion of visitors and media. <Flight, GC, Lock the doors,> she sinks into her seat, <Folks, it's time to kick off the, uh,> she grabs her big binder and finds the tab,

She starts sobbing openly when she releases the mike switch.

Stronger, now, Bill says, both into his phone and on the loop, <Yutran Aerospace, Sprint Mission Control. We are formally requesting copies of all production, inspection and test records for all thrusters aboard Sprint One according to our Chapter Fourteen contingency procedures.> He hangs up, then picks himself off the floor. <Flight, Stove,> he sobs, <Yutran Aerospace says that the right hand main thruster's ultrasonic inspection images were signed off by a temporary employee who was not qualified, but accidentally authorized to approve ultrasonic inspections.>

Lucy can't answer. All she can think is, <I should have trusted him. He has a nose for these sorts of things, I should have trusted him. And now he's dead.>

Sandy starts killing the televisions in the visitor's gallery. All the channels are carrying the Canadian Aerospace Society's webcast, showing the roomful of devastated engineers, struggling through their tears to copy and preserve data for the upcoming investigation. She knows he's alive, she can feel it. What she doesn't know is if he'll make it back.

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BANG!! The sound scares him so bad that the suit's top secret absorbent underwear is the hero of the moment. His master alarm goes off. His display shows the mad message: "Maneuver Terminated: Aberrant Roll Rate" His rearward facing camera is gone, his forward facing camera, guidance instrumentation, the three sets of which, thank God, are still in agreement, and the view out the window, shows that his ship is tumbling out of control. Trying some thrusters to stabilize it only makes it worse.

Then he sees it: his ship is surrounded by a cloud of debris, the familiar "gold" foil, which is actually a laminate of kapton and aluminum, chunks of what appear to be the service module's structural truss, pieces of a titanium tank, a cloud of mist. He closes his eyes, his ears starting to ache from the buzzing alarm.

Pressing his microphone switch, "Malton, this is Sprint One." The spacecraft responds with a soft tone. His communication system has been destroyed and his voice automatically piped to the emergency UHF radio.

<I am going to die,> he realizes.

Regaining control of his mind, he hits the Master Alarm button. It doesn't quiet. Again. It is still buzzing. Five more times he hits it, a total of seven Master Alarms. The next thing he does is switch to the Descent Module's reaction control system and slows his tumble, although it doesn't seem to be responding perfectly either, at least it works. All these alarms, plus a few dozen alert messages confirm what he saw out the window. Over half of his stove has been destroyed. The service module is in ruins, but fortunately, a thick plate of aluminum honeycomb with spray-on insulation protects his heatshield, which passed yesterday's in-space inspection. He prays that it is still good.

One of his four stove hydrazine tanks survived the explosion, that and just two Service Module thrusters, that explains why the stove RCS did nothing to dampen his ship's wild gyrations. It also explains why the Descent Module RCS isn't responding properly. The Service Module has a lot of stuff blown off its right side, he doesn't know how much. The ship is out of balance. What makes him feel hope, is that none of the alarms carry the acronym, "BMM".

The explosion reminded him of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, when an oxygen tank exploded in their stove - er, service module, of the crew ferry and mothership named Oddessy.

43 years of Brooke's Law worked in his favor. Each of his craft's three redundant guidance computers had thousands of times more memory and computing power than the entire Apollo Program at the time Oddessy went bang. He pulled one off its normal guidance mode and started doing scenarios for how the backup maneuver motor was going to affect the ship's attitude. He saw from an outside perspective how his ship, which still looked perfect in the computer generated images, would tumble and spin, now that the guidance system had used the descent module thrusters to measure the mass properties of his ship.

The maneuver would last 32 seconds, and he had to keep the BMM nozzle pointed approximately in the retrograde direction. He didn't have time to program the guidance system to stabilize the ship, so he'd have to do that by hand. He did, however, have time to do a couple practice runs in simulation mode using the mass analysis. In the computer generated model, the ship visually looked perfect, but add the redrawn total centre of gravity, stove centre of gravity, and the resulting thruster misalignments, and the screen had a cloud of red numbers just as ugly as the cloud of shred floating outside.

With the console plugged back into its mount, straps done up, helmet and gloves on and visor down, Thomas Shinra turned off the cabin lights, then pushed the control stick to the right and held it there, firing thrusters until the ship was spinning, with an annoying wobble, once every five seconds. With about a minute to go, he decides to open his visor and pop another anti-nausea pill. He disables the control stick and puts his hands on the touchscreen console. Each thruster is shown, along with its misalignment, overlaid on the forward entry camera view. This will certainly work better than the stick, he thinks.

He takes his palm off the BMM key and presses the "Fire" button with his gloved index finger. Two seconds behind schedule. The solid-fuelled rocket comes to life with a bang and a kick that startles Thomas, who is less than a metre a head and to the left, inside the descent module.

Rapidly he gets his right hand back on the touchscreen, the spinning spacecraft rushes out of the debris cloud, and Thomas can hear a few pieces bounce off the hatch in the nose, and the sides of his ship. His heart leaps with hope, <I'm not dead!> He struggles to keep the ship from "going flat" as it spins, the little thrusters flashing outside as he hits the virtual buttons.

The motor burns out, and Thomas relaxes, tries to anyway, <Sandy, I'm coming home.> He ejects the service module and engages the autopilot. The guidance system brings the ship to heel, and, to his amazement, converges a couple minutes after entry. The glow of entry flame visible out the window, he realizes that his crazy, almost uncontrollable deorbit maneuver was close enough to let him reach a routine landing in Cape Canaveral's artificial Sprint Recovery Pond.

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A reporter, her male assistant hanging back, bursts into the ladies' washroom. Sandy, apparently named for her hair, which is darker and far shorter than Lucy's, spins in alarm from looking at herself in the mirror. The reporter pauses for a moment, for Sandy's white shirt is hiked up around her sides, her tummy bare above her pants, and the fabric seems to be wrapped over and held