Scav
Mostly Harmless
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. . . and because I can't leave you all hanging over the entire weekend (I would feel too bad!), I give you:
SEP-010, Chapter 12.
Flight Dynamics Officer, Christopher Wescott blinked as Constitution did something witchy.
One second, the gargantuan orbiter was in a stable free-float, about to undergo another passive thermal control roll to 'heads-down' . . . and the next, a slew of RCS commands recorded on his repeater console as she skew-turned violently in space.
Then the RCS commands stopped.
* * *
Flight Director Matthew Payton looked up as he heard a burst of static in his ear. The first to stir was FIDO . . . then Environmental . . . then MMACS. He read the body language emanating from the people in front of him: Confusion . . . with a healthy dose of steadily growing concern.
"FIDO, Flight," Payton said.
"Go ahead, Flight."
"What's the story with that skew turn, FIDO?"
"They just ordered up a massive orientation correction for some reason-- standby, Flight."
Payton stuck a finger between his teeth while he waited. A sudden skew turn sounded an awful lot like an evasive maneuver -- if Constitution were a road vehicle, of course. But it wasn't . . . and he found himself impatiently wishing for more information.
The air inside the room was suddenly uncomfortably ominous. He glanced at Greg Williams. Acting as CAPCOM -- the capsule communicator, he had obviously picked up on the sudden tenseness in the mission control room, but he hadn't heard anything over the radio loop yet, and that was making him look just as rattled as anyone else in the room.
"CAPCOM, let's get a status check while we're waiting on FIDO."
Williams nodded.
"Constitution, Houston, over."
"G.C., Flight," Payton said.
"Go ahead, Flight."
"G.C., close the doors."
* * *
Mission Commander Brian Adkinson tore his eyes away from Jamie Cunningham long enough to stab the red, blinking master caution button at his forward panel. The alarms silenced, and Jamie shivered audibly as she rocked herself in her chair.
She looked like she had just seen a ghost. Her face was sheet-white, and her eyes, pupils dilated widely, stared directly into space at something only she could see. He looked at the Caution and Warning panel and his heart froze.
There was only one light illuminated -- in red. L WING.
His hand flew over to the left multifunction display in the center panel, and he called up a report.
"Downs!" He called nervously over his left shoulder. "Get your ass up here!"
"I'm here!" Downs replied from just to the right of Adkinson's head. Adkinson jerked his head around and sighed.
"Oh, good. We just got hit by something. I need you to get the RMS arm up and running. Take a look at the left wing; top and bottom side."
"On it."
Svetlana Zaytseva was the next to float into the cockpit. "What happened?" She said. "I heard a great crash."
"Svetlana, go check on Sienna and make sure she's okay, will you? We've been hit by something."
Svetlana turned around immediately, muttering in Russian as she disappeared down the transfer tunnel.
"Brian, I've got an image here," Downs announced. "Top-side of the wing looks okay."
"That's a relief," Adkinson chirped. "I'm not seeing any indications of a tank rupture, so we're good there. What about the bottom side? I can't get this warning to clear the system."
"Just a sec," Downs replied as he went to work.
* * *
"Flight, I can't raise them," Williams snarled. Matthew Payton craned his neck closer, and the first glimmer of horror crossed his eyes.
"Keep trying."
"Flight, Surgeon."
"Go."
"Their heart rates have all just jumped twenty beats per minute. Adkinson's and Cunningham's, especially."
* * *
Brian Adkinson had just ran out of curses . . . and now he stewed, riveted to the monitor in front of him. His anger intermingled with astonished fear behind his eyes. The image on the monitor confirmed it: A hafnium diboride-imbued thermal protection plate was missing from the underside of the ship, exposing the internal structural work, a pierced SCRAM fuel tank, and several wires and conduits to space. The debris looked like dirty ice as it spun around the impact site.
They were doomed. He knew it. Even Jamie Cunningham . . . who had just come out of her shell a moment ago . . . retreated back inside whatever hell she was reliving once she saw the imagery.
"Well, that's a kick in the goolies," He finally growled. Anthony Downs snorted ruefully as he pointed to the monitor.
"We can't go aerobraking like that. There's nothing for it. We're lucky whatever we hit didn't take out that structural spar; otherwise we wouldn't have a wing."
"We're lucky Jamie saw what she saw, and did what she did," Adkinson growled. "Otherwise we'd all be dead."
Jamie looked up at that. She spent enough of her time replaying what she could see from the incident to know the cold-blooded truth: Had she not reacted, the debris would have impacted squarely through the cockpit and quite possibly rended its way through the orbiter itself. She heaved a racking sigh and then her gaze retreated back to her hands.
It was then that Brian Adkinson finally noticed the strange buzzing sound. He looked around himself, eyes narrowing in curiosity . . . and he found his earpiece.
Putting the earpiece back into his ear, he triggered the device to enable VOX.
"Houston, Constitution," He said evenly.
"Status report, please," Williams replied stonily.
"We've been struck by some debris, Houston. All human occupants are unharmed."
"Glad to hear that, Brian. And the ship? We're getting some anomalous readings down here."
"Let me get back to you, Greg."
"Copy that," Williams replied sourly.
"Look, we need to work out another option," Adkinson said to Downs. "Do we have enough delta-vee to slow us down once we reach perigee?"
"Sure, Brian. I'd have to work out the math, but we'd be coming down at what? Twenty one? Twenty two thousand knots?"
"Yeah, something like that," Adkinson conceded.
"All we'd have to do is lose four thousand and we're good."
"The original plan was to take two or three passes," Adkinson said. "We're looking at just one shot, now."
"If we run the tanks down to near empty," Jamie Cunningham said softly. Both Adkinson and Downs snapped their heads around to look. ". . . we'll be able to put her in a parabolic orbit. I don't want to exhaust the tanks. We'll need the reserve for debris avoidance. We'll have a very high apogee; won't be quite like a Molniya orbit, but it will work."
"Good," Adkinson said. "Anthony, I want you to get below. Get me a run-down of what kind of supplies we've got left; what we can stretch, and what we should consume right away. Then give me an inventory of our systems. Get me an idea of what we've got left, and what works and doesn't work."
"Got it," Downs said as he swam out of the cockpit.
"Houston, Constitution," Adkinson called.
"Brian, we're still working on things down here. Are you stable up there?"
"Yes, we are, Greg. We're working on sorting our own mess up here."
"That's good to hear, Brian. Stand-by."
"Jamie?" Adkinson ventured as the cockpit fell silent.
"Yeah, Brian," She replied softly.
"Who's Jason?"
Her face set to stone once more as she heard his words, and she saw him withdraw subtly out of the corner of her eye.
"Don't go," She mumbled. "I'm sorry," Her voice came out stronger, "Jason was a friend of mine. He . . ."
Adkinson pushed himself closer, setting his green eyes upon hers.
"I need to know if this is going to compromise the mission, Jamie," He said softly, and she snorted at him.
"The mission is already compromised, Brian."
"True that," He conceded mulishly. He held her eyes briefly, and she nodded to him.
"Alright. He was . . . one of the few people actually interested in me as a person where I grew up," She continued. "You see, where I come from, the only activities of interest out there are cow tipping and driving huge trucks through the mud and making a lot of noise."
Adkinson nodded with a blank look on his face, but his eyes probed for more.
"And . . . I was that girl with the bright orange hair, the striped leggings, the trenchcoat, and the book on quantum physics clutched in my grasp. I was not about to end up some dumb drunk chick passed out in the back of some dude's truck while he's doing ninety down a dirt road at night, dodging deer."
Adkinson gave her a wan smile. "What happened to you two?"
"He, uh . . ." She started, and a dark, murky look crossed her eyes. "He died in a car crash."
Adkinson's eyes widened. "I'm sorry."
"We got t-boned at an intersection," She let her voice fall to little more than a whisper. "I was there. I was riding shotgun. The guy who hit us was doing three times the speed limit and he blew right through the intersection right in front of the bank. I don't think Jason ever knew what hit him."
"How did--" Adkinson ventured, and she cut him off with a grim look.
"I almost died, myself, you know," Her voice came out as a lifeless monotone. "I was two months in physical therapy, and another month learning how to live again. I could've broken my back for good, but the doctors said I was hella lucky. I had some swollen discs from the crash, but nothing broke. After it was all said and done, I . . . was able to fully recover . . . get my diploma, and I went straight into the University. I earned my B.S., and ended up here."
"Yeah," Adkinson murmured. "And here we are."
"Yup," She sighed. "Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to exercise a little pilot's authority, because I think we both know where this is going."
They shared a long, hard glance, and he nodded to her.
"Go for it," He said.
"Okay, Houston, Constitution PLT," Jamie Cunningham said as she keyed her microphone. Her voice was soft, but her eyes were as cold as space now as she intoned the words, and Brian Adkinson swallowed discreetly as he watched her ice-frozen form float rigidly above her seat as she closed her eyes and concentrated on her words.
"Go ahead, Jamie," The voice on the other end of the radio said.
"Houston, I, uh . . . I don't know how to say it any more delicately than this. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to skip the aerobraking part of our flight, and we're going to run out the fuel we have on board to lower our apogee once we encounter perigee. After that, you people on the ground are going to consider the next option we've just given ourselves."
Her voice took on a razor-sharp quality; hard as a diamond cutter and as unyielding as rock.
"You see," She continued, "We've got this hole in our wing, says we're not going to make a re-entry. But I also happen to know there's this crate sitting on the ground at Edwards, says we've got another chance to survive. We're not going to burn up in some stupid aerobraking maneuver, and we're not going to starve to death out here. It took eighteen days, man. Eighteen days to get this very ship we're sitting in back up into space after her maiden flight. The least you can do is expedite Enterprise up for us and chase us up some sandwiches and another fuel canister so we can at least dock with the other crate floating around in space up here. Are we clear?"
* * *
Flight Director Matthew Payton winced as he heard the words coming through on the loop . . . and in spite of himself, he nodded. The suggestion Jamie Cunningham had just made, while emotionally heated, made sense. And, it was a timely suggestion as well: He knew that . . . as of this moment . . . most of his pit crew were still trying to grasp their minds fully around what had just happened.
"G.C., Flight," He called softly.
"Go ahead," He heard the voice call back.
"G.C., can you confer with Edwards to see if what the PLT is suggesting is feasible at this time?"
There was silence on the loop for several seconds, then finally:
"Stand by, Flight."
* * *
SEP-010, Chapter 12.
Flight Dynamics Officer, Christopher Wescott blinked as Constitution did something witchy.
One second, the gargantuan orbiter was in a stable free-float, about to undergo another passive thermal control roll to 'heads-down' . . . and the next, a slew of RCS commands recorded on his repeater console as she skew-turned violently in space.
Then the RCS commands stopped.
* * *
Flight Director Matthew Payton looked up as he heard a burst of static in his ear. The first to stir was FIDO . . . then Environmental . . . then MMACS. He read the body language emanating from the people in front of him: Confusion . . . with a healthy dose of steadily growing concern.
"FIDO, Flight," Payton said.
"Go ahead, Flight."
"What's the story with that skew turn, FIDO?"
"They just ordered up a massive orientation correction for some reason-- standby, Flight."
Payton stuck a finger between his teeth while he waited. A sudden skew turn sounded an awful lot like an evasive maneuver -- if Constitution were a road vehicle, of course. But it wasn't . . . and he found himself impatiently wishing for more information.
The air inside the room was suddenly uncomfortably ominous. He glanced at Greg Williams. Acting as CAPCOM -- the capsule communicator, he had obviously picked up on the sudden tenseness in the mission control room, but he hadn't heard anything over the radio loop yet, and that was making him look just as rattled as anyone else in the room.
"CAPCOM, let's get a status check while we're waiting on FIDO."
Williams nodded.
"Constitution, Houston, over."
"G.C., Flight," Payton said.
"Go ahead, Flight."
"G.C., close the doors."
* * *
Mission Commander Brian Adkinson tore his eyes away from Jamie Cunningham long enough to stab the red, blinking master caution button at his forward panel. The alarms silenced, and Jamie shivered audibly as she rocked herself in her chair.
She looked like she had just seen a ghost. Her face was sheet-white, and her eyes, pupils dilated widely, stared directly into space at something only she could see. He looked at the Caution and Warning panel and his heart froze.
There was only one light illuminated -- in red. L WING.
His hand flew over to the left multifunction display in the center panel, and he called up a report.
"Downs!" He called nervously over his left shoulder. "Get your ass up here!"
"I'm here!" Downs replied from just to the right of Adkinson's head. Adkinson jerked his head around and sighed.
"Oh, good. We just got hit by something. I need you to get the RMS arm up and running. Take a look at the left wing; top and bottom side."
"On it."
Svetlana Zaytseva was the next to float into the cockpit. "What happened?" She said. "I heard a great crash."
"Svetlana, go check on Sienna and make sure she's okay, will you? We've been hit by something."
Svetlana turned around immediately, muttering in Russian as she disappeared down the transfer tunnel.
"Brian, I've got an image here," Downs announced. "Top-side of the wing looks okay."
"That's a relief," Adkinson chirped. "I'm not seeing any indications of a tank rupture, so we're good there. What about the bottom side? I can't get this warning to clear the system."
"Just a sec," Downs replied as he went to work.
* * *
"Flight, I can't raise them," Williams snarled. Matthew Payton craned his neck closer, and the first glimmer of horror crossed his eyes.
"Keep trying."
"Flight, Surgeon."
"Go."
"Their heart rates have all just jumped twenty beats per minute. Adkinson's and Cunningham's, especially."
* * *
Brian Adkinson had just ran out of curses . . . and now he stewed, riveted to the monitor in front of him. His anger intermingled with astonished fear behind his eyes. The image on the monitor confirmed it: A hafnium diboride-imbued thermal protection plate was missing from the underside of the ship, exposing the internal structural work, a pierced SCRAM fuel tank, and several wires and conduits to space. The debris looked like dirty ice as it spun around the impact site.
They were doomed. He knew it. Even Jamie Cunningham . . . who had just come out of her shell a moment ago . . . retreated back inside whatever hell she was reliving once she saw the imagery.
"Well, that's a kick in the goolies," He finally growled. Anthony Downs snorted ruefully as he pointed to the monitor.
"We can't go aerobraking like that. There's nothing for it. We're lucky whatever we hit didn't take out that structural spar; otherwise we wouldn't have a wing."
"We're lucky Jamie saw what she saw, and did what she did," Adkinson growled. "Otherwise we'd all be dead."
Jamie looked up at that. She spent enough of her time replaying what she could see from the incident to know the cold-blooded truth: Had she not reacted, the debris would have impacted squarely through the cockpit and quite possibly rended its way through the orbiter itself. She heaved a racking sigh and then her gaze retreated back to her hands.
It was then that Brian Adkinson finally noticed the strange buzzing sound. He looked around himself, eyes narrowing in curiosity . . . and he found his earpiece.
Putting the earpiece back into his ear, he triggered the device to enable VOX.
"Houston, Constitution," He said evenly.
"Status report, please," Williams replied stonily.
"We've been struck by some debris, Houston. All human occupants are unharmed."
"Glad to hear that, Brian. And the ship? We're getting some anomalous readings down here."
"Let me get back to you, Greg."
"Copy that," Williams replied sourly.
"Look, we need to work out another option," Adkinson said to Downs. "Do we have enough delta-vee to slow us down once we reach perigee?"
"Sure, Brian. I'd have to work out the math, but we'd be coming down at what? Twenty one? Twenty two thousand knots?"
"Yeah, something like that," Adkinson conceded.
"All we'd have to do is lose four thousand and we're good."
"The original plan was to take two or three passes," Adkinson said. "We're looking at just one shot, now."
"If we run the tanks down to near empty," Jamie Cunningham said softly. Both Adkinson and Downs snapped their heads around to look. ". . . we'll be able to put her in a parabolic orbit. I don't want to exhaust the tanks. We'll need the reserve for debris avoidance. We'll have a very high apogee; won't be quite like a Molniya orbit, but it will work."
"Good," Adkinson said. "Anthony, I want you to get below. Get me a run-down of what kind of supplies we've got left; what we can stretch, and what we should consume right away. Then give me an inventory of our systems. Get me an idea of what we've got left, and what works and doesn't work."
"Got it," Downs said as he swam out of the cockpit.
"Houston, Constitution," Adkinson called.
"Brian, we're still working on things down here. Are you stable up there?"
"Yes, we are, Greg. We're working on sorting our own mess up here."
"That's good to hear, Brian. Stand-by."
"Jamie?" Adkinson ventured as the cockpit fell silent.
"Yeah, Brian," She replied softly.
"Who's Jason?"
Her face set to stone once more as she heard his words, and she saw him withdraw subtly out of the corner of her eye.
"Don't go," She mumbled. "I'm sorry," Her voice came out stronger, "Jason was a friend of mine. He . . ."
Adkinson pushed himself closer, setting his green eyes upon hers.
"I need to know if this is going to compromise the mission, Jamie," He said softly, and she snorted at him.
"The mission is already compromised, Brian."
"True that," He conceded mulishly. He held her eyes briefly, and she nodded to him.
"Alright. He was . . . one of the few people actually interested in me as a person where I grew up," She continued. "You see, where I come from, the only activities of interest out there are cow tipping and driving huge trucks through the mud and making a lot of noise."
Adkinson nodded with a blank look on his face, but his eyes probed for more.
"And . . . I was that girl with the bright orange hair, the striped leggings, the trenchcoat, and the book on quantum physics clutched in my grasp. I was not about to end up some dumb drunk chick passed out in the back of some dude's truck while he's doing ninety down a dirt road at night, dodging deer."
Adkinson gave her a wan smile. "What happened to you two?"
"He, uh . . ." She started, and a dark, murky look crossed her eyes. "He died in a car crash."
Adkinson's eyes widened. "I'm sorry."
"We got t-boned at an intersection," She let her voice fall to little more than a whisper. "I was there. I was riding shotgun. The guy who hit us was doing three times the speed limit and he blew right through the intersection right in front of the bank. I don't think Jason ever knew what hit him."
"How did--" Adkinson ventured, and she cut him off with a grim look.
"I almost died, myself, you know," Her voice came out as a lifeless monotone. "I was two months in physical therapy, and another month learning how to live again. I could've broken my back for good, but the doctors said I was hella lucky. I had some swollen discs from the crash, but nothing broke. After it was all said and done, I . . . was able to fully recover . . . get my diploma, and I went straight into the University. I earned my B.S., and ended up here."
"Yeah," Adkinson murmured. "And here we are."
"Yup," She sighed. "Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to exercise a little pilot's authority, because I think we both know where this is going."
They shared a long, hard glance, and he nodded to her.
"Go for it," He said.
"Okay, Houston, Constitution PLT," Jamie Cunningham said as she keyed her microphone. Her voice was soft, but her eyes were as cold as space now as she intoned the words, and Brian Adkinson swallowed discreetly as he watched her ice-frozen form float rigidly above her seat as she closed her eyes and concentrated on her words.
"Go ahead, Jamie," The voice on the other end of the radio said.
"Houston, I, uh . . . I don't know how to say it any more delicately than this. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to skip the aerobraking part of our flight, and we're going to run out the fuel we have on board to lower our apogee once we encounter perigee. After that, you people on the ground are going to consider the next option we've just given ourselves."
Her voice took on a razor-sharp quality; hard as a diamond cutter and as unyielding as rock.
"You see," She continued, "We've got this hole in our wing, says we're not going to make a re-entry. But I also happen to know there's this crate sitting on the ground at Edwards, says we've got another chance to survive. We're not going to burn up in some stupid aerobraking maneuver, and we're not going to starve to death out here. It took eighteen days, man. Eighteen days to get this very ship we're sitting in back up into space after her maiden flight. The least you can do is expedite Enterprise up for us and chase us up some sandwiches and another fuel canister so we can at least dock with the other crate floating around in space up here. Are we clear?"
* * *
Flight Director Matthew Payton winced as he heard the words coming through on the loop . . . and in spite of himself, he nodded. The suggestion Jamie Cunningham had just made, while emotionally heated, made sense. And, it was a timely suggestion as well: He knew that . . . as of this moment . . . most of his pit crew were still trying to grasp their minds fully around what had just happened.
"G.C., Flight," He called softly.
"Go ahead," He heard the voice call back.
"G.C., can you confer with Edwards to see if what the PLT is suggesting is feasible at this time?"
There was silence on the loop for several seconds, then finally:
"Stand by, Flight."
* * *
