4
SS Shepard
Simon took a halting sip from the water supply, fighting the urge to chug the entire bladder. His body wanted more, but there was no telling how long he’d have to make this last and he wasn’t in much of a position to bargain with nature. After combing through every nook and cranny of the airlock he hadn’t been able to find anything beyond the standard equipment. Perhaps it was divine punishment for running a tight ship. He always suspected that God had a peculiar sense of humor.
It could have been worse. At least the rations were stocked per the manifest: enough to sustain two people for two days on the outside chance that it would ever be necessary. Like right now. The problem was, he figured it would take the better part of a week for them to prep Grissom and start burning moonward.
He was confident that Art was already working on it. Simon had seen the man’s commitment first hand while he was on the International Space Station, helping Ryan Hunter rescue the marooned Austral Clipper. If he hadn’t essentially stolen it in defiance of a government impound order and flown it home at the ragged edge of its envelope...well, chances were they wouldn’t be in business right now. It had sickened him to learn some people high up in the space agency would’ve been happy to see that. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have helped him out. I’d be sitting on my porch in San Diego on top of a nice fat government pension.
He clipped the water hose back into its mount, pulled on the rubberized spacesuit gloves, and floated over to an open maintenance panel. Fishing out two exposed wires, he held one in each hand and waited for Earth to reappear in the window. As his home planet rose above the lunar horizon, Simon began rhythmically tapping the stripped ends together.
. . .
Denver
The kink in Audrey’s back reminded her of just how long she’d been hunched over her workstation, awkwardly balancing a phone on her shoulder while talking to JPL’s deep space network. Her eyes kept returning to a timer above the wall screen as it counted down to the next predicted end of radio blackout. She felt a surge of anticipation as it reached zero, and looked over at the comm tech. He answered with a disappointed shrug, just more of the same mocking hiss of a dead frequency.
All of a sudden she shot upright, pressing her headset tight while contorting to balance the phone by her other ear. “Say again...where is it?” She scribbled some coordinates on a notepad and threw it at the comm tech. “Frequency change! Align the antennas here,” she shouted, “quickly!”
He punched up the antenna controls on a separate monitor and began shifting the high-gain receivers. A wildly oscillating pattern burst to life on screen. “I’ve got something! Static, but it’s not background. Sounds like carrier wave, Aud.”
Hammond pushed through the crowd with Penny and Grant trailing behind. He leaned in beside her while Penny hurriedly slipped on a spare headset, shutting out the ambient noise. “Can you talk to them?”
“Not yet,” she said, switching the feed to her desktop speakers. “Sounds like a stuck mic or something.” The tantalizing noise ended abruptly, then started again. Audrey frantically fine-tuned her own receiver only to have the buzz disappear once more. She lifted her hands plaintively; it wasn’t affected by anything they were doing.
“So maybe this really is just a radio failure?” he asked hopefully.
There was an abrupt shushing from Penny, who had been sitting in a near trance with the spare headset snugged down tight. “Listen. There’s a pattern here.” She gestured for Audrey to turn up the volume. “Hear that?” She looked out at a room full of blank stares. “Come on, nobody here remembers Morse code?”
They’d caught the last transmission in midstream so it took a moment to comprehend: three long bursts, a brief silence, then three more short bursts. The intervening gap had felt like an eternity until the pattern repeated a few more times: three short, three long, three short.
Hammond’s face lit up like a kid on Christmas. “Is that what I think it is?”
They leaned in closer, not quite believing their ears as the signal repeated: S.O.S.
. . .
Melbourne, Florida
Ryan dumped his go bag onto the bed, hurriedly separating the field gear that he wouldn’t need from the warmer clothing he would need. “Any luck yet?” he called in the general direction of their closet.
Marcy emerged with a winter jacket that hadn’t seen much use. As she brushed off the dust, their son trundled out in his dad’s boots and looked quite satisfied with himself. They easily came up to his knees.
“Marshall Thomas Hunter,” Ryan said with mock severity. “Where exactly do you think you’re going with those?”
“To the mountains,” he answered seriously. “With you.”
Marcy gave Ryan a nervous smile and laid his coat on the bed before bending down to lift Marshall out of his father’s boots. “No hon,” she said gently. “Daddy’s got to leave in a hurry to go help his friends.”
He flopped onto the bed with a disappointed frown. Having Daddy home early in the day usually meant something special. “I can help. Please?” He begged. “I want to see snow.”
Ryan sat beside him and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Sorry pal. I’ll be at work the whole time. It wouldn’t be any fun for you at all.” Or for anyone else, he left unsaid.
“Rockets look like fun. Why aren’t they fun for you?”
It was the kind of sucker punch only a little kid could throw. “They are fun,” he said defensively. “Grownups just have a way of making stuff boring sometimes.” He looked to Marcy, his eyes pleading for support. “Right, babe?”
She made it a point to distract their son with a toy before responding the way any wife would: as if she’d read his mind.
“Missing?” she whispered sharply as her mind ran through the possible outcomes. She had worked with or trained most of their cabin crew until Marshall came along, but their relationship with Simon Poole was on a whole different level. “There’s no way to pinpoint their orbit?”
“There’s ways,” Ryan said as he dug through the back of a drawer. “None of them are quick. Our antenna farms can’t sweep that wide of an area without everything turning into background noise. They have to have a pretty good idea of where it’ll show up first.”
She began to appreciate the circular riddle. “So you can’t find it without already knowing where it’s likely to be…”
“Right. But DSN can, eventually.” NASA’s Deep Space Network could find the proverbial needle in a haystack from a million miles away. “Penny’s greasing those wheels for us right now.”
“Sounds familiar. You think they’d be on to us by now.” They were both watching Marshall, who was vigorously leaping about the bed after discovering it could make Daddy’s duffel bag bounce. She turned back to face Ryan. “Find them. Find Simon. We owe him a lot.”
“We owe him everything,” Ryan said, and lifted the pack onto his shoulder.
. . .
SS Shepard
Simon let loose with a frustrated curse. He was confident that his improvised telegraph key had worked, but he couldn’t know if it had gotten their attention. He needed something better than one-way comm. Art’s machinists had done too good of a job mounting the intercom, probably without any thought that someone out here might need to actually remove it one day. And why would they? Who could possibly foresee the need to jury rig the airlock intercom into the high-gain antennas?
The torque-absorbing electric screwdriver he was currently struggling with could apparently only do half of its job: it kept him from spinning in the opposite direction but it couldn’t unseat the panel’s mounting screws.
He clipped it back into the tool kit and unfolded a screwdriver from the multi-tool that he habitually carried in his jumpsuit. This wasn’t going to be easy. His body had to both impart enough force to do the job and counteract it at the same time. Twisting hard one way would spin his body the opposite way.
Simon braced his legs against opposite bulkheads in a ridiculous ballerina stance that strained him in some decidedly unpleasant ways. Twist one way, push the opposite way. Twist and push. Again. He grunted with the strain, imagining the hernia he was probably inflicting on himself.
One more time.
The stubborn screw finally moved under the blade. Only a quarter turn, but it was enough to finish off with the fancy space tool. One more addition to a growing list of gripes for his debrief log.
Keep telling yourself that, hoss. Maybe you’ll actually find a way out of here.
After a blessedly easier time with the remaining fasteners, he was finally able to open the panel and get a good look inside. It was crowded in there, a tangle of conduits and cable harnesses. He poked in with the blade of his tool, pushing a bundle aside…
The airlock went dark.
Power failure? No. Far as he could tell the ship was still drawing from the solar cells and charging the standby batteries while they were in sunlight.
What the hell could’ve shorted out? He regarded the tool in his hand and questioned his own memory of first buying it – the thing was supposed to have nonconductive blades. Sure it did. It’s not like anything had been cut in there…which meant he must have nicked something earlier when he hotwired the high gain antenna. Whatever he’d moved had to have pushed against whatever else he’d cut earlier without realizing it. Now he’d have to troubleshoot that before he could finish cobbling together his makeshift radio. It would be easier to trace the lines if he could see their tags and color coding.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes began to resolve themselves and the compartment turned a bluish gray from weak starlight. He felt around in the emergency kit for the flashlight he knew would be there, and carefully set it floating in place above the open panel. It was enough, even though it’d be like working with a bare light bulb swinging above his head.
And here I was wondering how to keep myself busy.