Chapter 141 – Mission Problems

Alex hadn’t meant to scare the guy in the spacesuit, but she couldn’t exactly apologize until they had air and stuff.

Oh, wait, she could! She flew him into the EVA hatch, pulled the outer door shut with her TK, and pulled her tablet out of her morph. She typed ‘sorry!’ in a little notepad window and then used the touchscreen surface to enlarge the image so the letters were four inches high.

She got a tired nod out of him, which was about all she figured she was going to get after the guy had climbed over most of the outside of the ISS to get here. She figured he had to be pretty serious about something. Or really desperate.

The inner hatch swung open, and it was Sam!

Okay, it wasn’t other-Sam, it was her world’s Sam, and she looked kind of cruddy. She looked like she’d been on a tilt-a-whirl until she was so sick she urped all over the place, and then they still didn’t let her off for another hour.

Alex was suddenly really afraid that Sam was so contaminated with that icky alien stuff that it was too late to help her.

Alex stayed silvery and said, “Captain Carter, I’m Terawatt. Is the air safe to breathe?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. For now, anyway. I’ve been trying to keep the module disinfected … other than me, of course.” She looked over at the guy in the spacesuit and said, “This is Vince Elliott, the commander of the station.”

He looked at Alex and said, “Call me Vince, ma’am.” Then he shook his head inside the spacesuit. “And I’m not in command anymore, Carter. I’m contaminated, thanks to the last visitors we had. I’m not taking off the suit, either, because I’ve got contaminant on my shirt. The stuff feels like it’s eating through my uniform, too.”

Sam told him, “I can recharge your backpack env system while you tell Terawatt what just happened.”

Alex listened as Commander Elliott explained about the X-37 that had just left. With the samples of the goo. So it was a threat to everything on Earth. When he wrapped up, she asked, “Have you warned everyone down below?”

He scowled inside his helmet. “Michael wrecked the radio before he left.”

Sam said, “Lisa announced over the comms that Miku has a concussion, so fixing the radio may be harder without her skillset. And it’s not like I can go into the station and work on it.”

Vince hit the comm buttons under the flat screen monitor. “Lisa? What’s the status?”

Alex winced a little when Lisa came on. Too good-looking, perfect red hair even in low gravity, smart enough to be the medical officer on the ISS, maybe twenty-eight … She asked, “How long have you known you were an Orphan?”

Lisa immediately answered her. “Since the week before I was scheduled to fly up here. And it is not relevant.” She looked at Vince. “Miku has a serious concussion and a hairline fracture of the skull. Whatever Michael hit her with, he clearly didn’t care if she survived. Jun says the radio cannot be repaired without replacement parts from Earth, because Michael also smashed our replacement parts here. Hans says we still have quarantine in place, and his air samples are clean. Al says the two other bullets stayed in the module and embedded themselves in the walls where they won’t cause any damage, although one missed a window by only about a half a meter. And I have recovered footage of the incident.”

Alex asked, “Can I see it?”

Lisa just typed on a keyboard, and the scene played out on the monitor.

“Oh, crud.” Alex suddenly felt sick to her stomach. “I need to hear that again.”

“You need to see it again?” Lisa checked.

“Please, just play it again.” Alex closed her eyes and listened hard. After it finished, she said, “I know that voice. Now we definitely need to radio to the ground.”

Vince asked, “Can you get in the shuttle and use its radio?”

Sam actually shuddered. “Maybe. I don’t know if I can get past the lifeform, either coming or going. I’m computing that it’s now about six hundred fifty pounds of hungry fungus-like creature. I just barely made it out after I docked, and that was only because I tricked it into going for a pool of CO2 instead of me. I don’t know how fast it learns, so that may not work again, and I had to take my helmet and backpack off to try it.”

Alex asked, “Can you teach me how to use the radio in a couple of minutes?”

Sam frowned. “I don’t think so, unless you have military communications officer experience in your secret identity.”

Alex suggested, “Okay, how about you and I both go, and I’ll defend you while you operate the radio?”

Sam frowned again. “Your major offensive weapon is lightning, right?” Alex nodded. “This thing absorbs a wide range of electromagnetic frequencies and uses it to grow bigger.”

Alex thought it over and then asked, “Okay, do you have any cutting tools?”

Sam said, “You can’t hack and slash at this thing like a dragon in a fantasy novel.”

Alex told her, “Oh, I know how hard dragons are to fight, but that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

Vince choked, “You’ve fought actual dragons?”

Sam asked sharply, “Not metaphorical ones?”

Alex shrugged. “Well, not in this dimension. And they’re not as tough as some of the stuff that Maggie Walsh has made.”

Sam and Vince exchanged looks Sam asked, “Another dimension? You’re sure?”

Alex nodded. “Totally. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you. To talk to you about the physics involved.”

Sam looked a little suspicious. “Maybe we should wait until after we survive this.”

Vince said, “Let’s look in the tool chest they shoved in here.”

Alex saw where he was pointing. It was a big thing shaped like a pirate’s chest but with a flat top. She popped it open with her TK, and she saw that it had shelves on connectors so the shelves lifted up and back as the lid came up. Plus there were a bunch of smaller tools and spare parts in little boxes on the inside of the lid. She flew over and looked in it.

“Ooh! Perfect!” She lifted out from the bottom level a thing like a weird concrete-cutting saw with a great big circular sawblade. She used her TK to unscrew a nut and pull a bolt, and she took the blade out of the saw. “Now I’m ready.”

Sam grimaced. “I’m glad one of us is.” She looked over. “Elliott, don’t let the hatch open if there’s any of the lifeform in there with us. Even if we beg.”

Wow, that totally did not sound encouraging.

*               *               *

Roger McNamara waited until the X-37B stopped accelerating. He ordered, “Webb. Markham. Get Michael in the spare spacesuit, get the packs out of the locker, and show Michael where to attach his packs.”

He waited impatiently, while Michael was suited up, and the three men moved, one at a time, through the airlock of the EVA hatch with the six computer-controlled rocket-packs.

He asked his pilot, “Do you have programming complete on the rocket-packs?”

“Yes, colonel. The code keeps everything up to date. All I have to do is tell it when to fire the rockets, and it’ll work out the guidance and thrust based on current time and position, all by itself.”

“Great. This shouldn’t take long.”

Michael looked at the rocket-pack one more time. It was exactly where Webb had told him to put it. These six rockets ought to be plenty for this particular problem.

He was about to use the propulsion system to follow Webb and Markham back toward the X-37. He drifted away from the rocket-pack and triggered the system.

It sputtered and failed. “Wait! I have an emergency!”

They weren’t waiting. He continued to drift away from the satellite, but the two other men were accelerating to the X-37 and leaving him behind.

He checked the control strapped to his wrist. Nothing. He frantically unhooked his system and checked. It was out of fuel. They had given him a propulsion system that wouldn’t get him back to the ship with the others.

The rocket-packs all fired and drove the satellite out of its orbit, and into a new one. He watched as it jetted away, moving faster and faster relative to his position.

Webb was already onboard the X-37, and Markham was moving into the EVA hatch.

Michael watched in mounting horror as Markham moved into the X-37, and it jetted off, leaving him.

He realized they would never come back for him. No one could fly up and rescue him in the few hours he had left. He was going to drift here, utterly helpless and afraid, for hours until he ran out of air, and then he would slowly, painfully asphyxiate. The thought terrified him.

He had only one alternative. He could make it quick. He sobbed wretchedly. Then he unlocked the helmet and exposed himself to vacuum.

McNamara looked at his team and nodded. “Good work. That’s both of our loose ends taken care in one fell swoop.”

“What is ‘one fell swoop’ anyway?”

McNamara smiled. He always enjoyed getting to show his superior intelligence. “It’s Shakespeare. It’s from ‘Macbeth’. That’s why everyone always says the exact words ‘in one fell swoop’ because it’s a quote, even if they don’t know it.”

*               *               *

Sam Carter was scared. She was going back in the shuttle Atlantis anyway, but she was scared. It would be nice if the superheroine next to her looked worried, or even edgy. And Sam still wasn’t sure why Terawatt wanted a circular cutting blade with no motive force to operate it.

At least she didn’t have to go in by herself and then wait for someone else to follow through the EVA hatch. Still, after dealing with green pseudopods and green semi-solids, it was a little unnerving being in the close confines of the shuttle’s EVA hatch with a sentient silvery semi-solid.

The inner hatch opened, and green pseudopods started moving her way.

For about a second.

Something invisible swept through the air and knocked all the pseudopods backward like an enormous tennis racket.

Holy Hannah. Maybe Terawatt had good reason not to be too worried about this thing.

A large mass of fungoid growth moved off the opposite wall and oozed toward them. Terawatt just looked at it. Sam saw the mass move slightly, like someone was tugging on it. Maybe Terawatt was trying to use her telekinetic powers on it.

It suddenly lifted off the wall and floor, and went flying to smash against the rear wall of the shuttle.

Terawatt merely flew on, like this was nothing. Maybe this was nothing, as far as she was concerned. Sam was beginning to suspect that after Gojira, and an army of silicates, and other-dimensional dragons, and supervillain teams, maybe this was peanuts for Terawatt.

They flew over the masses of moving lifeform, and Sam noticed she wasn’t having to make any adjustments. Terawatt was steering her as well. Several pseudopods were swatted away like annoying flies, and the door to the control cabin swung open for them. Terawatt took a quick look inside before telekinetically pulling Sam in after her and then shutting the door.

“Let’s make that radio call.”

Sam took a breath and said, “On it.” It still felt weird having a silvery blob talking to her. She strapped herself in the pilot’s seat and flipped on the radio systems. She mentioned, “I had to use duct tape to keep the lifeform from oozing through the seals around the door.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Terawatt calmly told her. “Once you have Houston, I’ll need to speak to General Peterson. I need to contact the President and General Jack O’Neill.”

Cripes! The President? A handful of generals? Terawatt was playing in a completely different league from Captain Samantha Carter.

“Mission Control, this is Captain Sam Carter in the Atlantis. Mission control, please come in.”

“Atlantis, this is Mission Control. We thought you were evac’ing Atlantis and moving to an isolation module on the ISS.”

“Houston, I did so. I’m with Terawatt, and we’re back in the Atlantis because the ISS has no radio comms anymore. It was sabotage.”

Terawatt floated just over her shoulder. “This is Terawatt. I need General Peterson on this call, and I need him to get the President and also General Jack O’Neill of the DHS. And I need this done in the next two minutes, because we have a limited amount of time before the alien gets into the forward cabin and eats us. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am. General Peterson will be here in … Oh, sorry, sir.”

“This is General Peterson. Am I talking to Terawatt?”

Terawatt calmly replied, “Yes, general. We have a crisis going on up here, and you’re about to have one on Earth if we don’t coordinate this fast enough.”

The general answered, “My adjutant is already calling General O’Neill. General Jackson gave us a contact number in case you insisted. And we’re trying to get the President on another line.”

“Thank you,” Terawatt easily said.

Sam was taking mental notes on this. Not that she was expecting she would ever get to push generals around, but it was still a useful, transferable skill.

Terawatt made a slight noise, and Sam took a quick peek. Green tendrils were trying to ooze their way in around the door, but were running into some sort of force field. Sam was going to assume it was another application of telekinesis, until she needed to rethink her supposition.

Terawatt calmly muttered, “Persistent little stinker, isn’t it?”

Suddenly a voice Sam had never heard before was on the radio. “O’Neill here. Tera, do you have a problem? An FYI? Maybe a 4-1-1?”

She let people call her ‘Tera’? Maybe Terawatt worked with General O’Neill a lot.

Terawatt said, “D. All of the above. And I’d like the President to hear this, too.”

Then a voice Sam had heard plenty of times — but never in person — came on. “Terawatt, this is the President. I assume you found something critical.”

Terawatt summarized, “The lifeform is real, and dangerous. Carter is infected but holding out for now. The station commander was infected when an X-37 flew up, pretended to be from the ESA, and stole all of Carter’s samples thanks to a mole onboard the ISS. The station’s flight engineer. Michael something. The X-37 team were armed with handguns and tasers. They shot and killed the RSA officer on board, then they deliberately opened a sample bottle and Commander Elliott intercepted it before it could contaminate several modules and possibly the central core of the station. But now he’s contaminated, too. Sir, it was an American team in spacesuits, and I recognized the voice of their leader. It was Colonel Roger McNamara of the NID.”

General O’Neill said several colorful phrases that Sam would never have the nerve to say in front of the President.

The President growled, “General O’Neill, that reflects my sentiments exactly. What do we need to do?”

Terawatt replied, “The ISS has no radio, due to sabotage. The only radio we have is this one, in the shuttle, which puts any operator at the mercy of six hundred pounds of omnivorous green slime. The commander is contaminated and now in the isolation module. Their 2IC is dead. The comm officer is in the med bay with a serious concussion. The flight engineer was a mole for the NID, and left with the X-37. The ISS is currently being run by the doctor, an Italian woman named Lisa, I don’t know her last name. But I do know this. She’s an Orphan. McNamara identified her as one, so he may have an Orphan or two working with him. And he has three samples of this lifeform. I think that puts this squarely in the purview of General O’Neill’s people. That X-37 needs to be tracked, and then stopped before they — accidentally or on purpose — release this lifeform where we cannot quarantine it.”

General O’Neill said, “We’re on it as of this second … Unless the President says otherwise.”

The President answered, “No general, I’m not saying otherwise. I’m telling you that you have this op, regardless of other agencies getting their noses out of joint.”

General O’Neill casually asked, “So Tera, any other crises or apocalypses?”

“No, general.”

“In that case, we’ll let you sign off so you can fight your way past alien tentacles to get out of there.”

The President said, “Good luck, Terawatt.”

“Thank you, sir. Over and out.”

Sam had a lot of questions, but apparently that fact was all over her face. Terawatt looked at her and said, “Yes, he calls me Tera. You can, too — in fact, I’d like you to. And yes, he’s that big a smart aleck all the time. If the President hadn’t been on the line, he probably would have made a joke about hentai or something. And if I have any say in the matter, you’ll be meeting him.”

Sam then wondered if perhaps Terawatt also had some telepathy.

Terawatt — Sam was not ready to call her ‘Tera’ — told her, “Let’s get out of here while we still can.”

Sam asked, “You don’t really think the intruders were using Orphans, do you? Based on the footage we saw, their leader seemed opposed to the general idea.”

Terawatt answered smugly, “No, I don’t. But Lisa is definitely one, and I trust General O’Neill’s people a lot more than anybody else out there, so I gave him enough leeway to get his agency involved.”

Sam made a mental note that Terawatt was sneakier than she acted.

Terawatt turned and swung open the cabin door. There was a solid wall of green blocking the doorway.

Sam stared in horror. Terawatt just sighed, like she had expected this, or at least something like this.

The huge circular blade came out of her morph, and began spinning faster and faster. Sam had an impulse to back up, because that blade looked deadly.

The blade suddenly swooped forward and sliced along one edge of the doorframe, cutting through the alien like it was made of jello. Three more cuts along the edges of the doorframe, and a rectangle of green fell backward out of the doorway to crash on the floor of the shuttle bay. The whirling blade ducked around the doorframe and sliced through half a dozen tentacles that moved in toward the doorway.

Terawatt transformed from that silvery amorphous form to her usual superheroine form. Sam watched, and she wondered how the shapeshifting worked, and what the physical principles behind it could be.

Terawatt zipped out through the center of the doorway and whirled around about ten feet on the other side. The sliced rectangle of green went flying back to smash against the back wall of the shuttle bay. The blade sliced through some more of the fungoid mass where it was gathered around the other side of the doorframe, and suddenly four sections of the green went flying back toward the stern, one after the other.

Terawatt looked at Sam, and Sam felt herself being yanked out of the seat and pulled straight to the EVA hatch. They ducked inside it and shut the inner door before sealing it and moving through the outer hatch, into the module’s docking airlock.

Vince opened the hatch and waved them in. “Any problems?”

Sam just said, “Take a look at the blade.”

Vince winced a little inside his spacesuit, because there was green goo all around the outer two-thirds of the blade.

Sam hastily opened up a sample container and held it open for Terawatt to shove the blade in. Then she used the port on the top of the container to squeeze in a pint of wide-spectrum disinfectant. She shook the container until every bit of green was being attacked by disinfectants. She still sealed the sample container anyway.

*               *               *

Jack listened carefully to General Jackson. “Look Jack, I’ve already got NASA, NORAD, the ESA, and the Russians tracking that X-37. The RSA is pretty pissed about some of our people murdering their cosmonaut on the ISS, so they’re going to track this thing with everything they’ve got, and they’re going to want McNamara’s head on a platter.”

Jack said, “That would be just fine with me, sir. I even know some people who would like to serve McNamara up for us, maybe nicely roasted first. Although I’d like to have him alive long enough for him to testify against everyone else involved in this fiasco, starting probably with Harry Maybourne and whoever’s behind him.”

*               *               *

Alex watched while Lisa checked with them over the station communication monitors. Lisa announced, “Miku is doing better. I’ve got her heavily sedated now, because concussions and skull fractures are nothing to play with. But she managed to tell me that Michael received a coded message, he left for a couple of minutes, he came back, and he tied her up and gagged her and shoved her in the storage locker. She tried to get loose or call for help, but he did too good a job. Only a few hours later did he come back and probably hit her with something blunt and cylindrical based on the damage. She doesn’t have a recollection of that moment, which is pretty common with blows to the head like that.”

Vince said from inside his spacesuit, “Well, at least Sam and Terawatt contacted NASA for us. We’ll probably get another cargo capsule with spares for the radio gear, and anything else we find Michael ruined.”

Lisa frowned. “Good. We can’t fix it with what we still have onboard. So I have Hans checking the remote sampler for any more programming boobytraps, Jun checking the other science modules for anything Michael might have left us, like bombs, and Al checking the food stores. I’m going over life support, just in case Michael did something unpleasant there. And Hans is still doing hourly air samples to make sure we still have the quarantine in place.”

Vince nodded. “Sounds good. Thanks for taking charge, Lisa.”

She grumbled, “How could I not? Remember, I’m an Orphan.”

Alex finally admitted, “I don’t really think you’re part of their international terrorist organization. I just used that to bring General O’Neill’s agency in on things. Sorry. And if it helps, the general knows that plenty of Orphans don’t want to be part of the big kill-everyone-off thing.” She thought about saying ‘some of my best friends are Orphans’ but that sounded so patronizing and some-of-my-best-friends-are-black. Even if some of her best friends were black. And at least one of her best friends really was an Orphan. “Besides, ‘dedicated medical professional trying to save lives’ pretty much says ‘not a part of the Orphan terrorist plot’.”

Lisa scowled. “It was inevitable. Vince heard what the invaders said, and he saw me manhandle Michael.”

Vince told her, “It doesn’t matter to me. Really.”

Alex thought Lisa might burst into tears at that.

Sam said, “And I’ll do the monitoring duty on that X-37, since I’m stuck in here and I’ve got adequate astrophysics equipment.”

Vince pointed out, “You should be able to access the station’s astrophysics equipment from here. We’re not the Hubble, but we’ve got good equipment, and servicing it is a lot easier than flying up to the Hubble. We just walk outside and around the corner.”

Sam nodded. “I know the specs. You’ve got a high resolution UV spectrograph, a wide-field optical camera, and a high-speed photometer.” She started typing on a keyboard underneath a different monitor. “I wrote most of the software with cooperators at UC San Diego and U Dub-Madison.”

Vince grimaced a little and muttered, “Naturally.”

Sam popped up an image of the stars, in what Alex figured was the visible light spectrum, just based on how it looked like what could be seen out the window. She muttered under her breath, “Flightpath of the X-37 …” Another window popped up on the screen, and a series of overlapping images showed the X-37 rocketing off and getting farther away, and then coasting alongside what had to be a satellite. Then the satellite they were next to suddenly turned on rockets and started moving, but the rockets were pointing away from the ISS so they were harder to see. And the X-37 took off again.

Sam winced. “Oh, no.”

Vince looked up. “What?”

“It’s the Envisat.”

Vince growled, “That piece of shit? It’s been dead in the water for years.”

Sam said, “Not anymore. They slapped at least four large rocket-packs on it. Maybe six. It’s hard to be sure from here.”

Alex gulped a little. If the rockets were firing, but they were pointing away from the ISS, then they were pushing the Envisat at them.

Lisa asked from the communications monitor, “How is their aim?”

Sam typed rapidly on the keyboard, and the screen turned into what looked like an image of the Envisat surrounded by blue lines and projections. She typed some more. And then some more. “Umm, I hate to say it, but it looks like their aim is good. Really, really good. It’s going to hit us at about fourteen hundred kph. In just under eleven minutes, unless we can move perpendicular to its motion.”

Vince pointed out, “We have twelve unsupported module chains sticking out from our central core, plus four solar-panel wings that are wider and longer than our biggest level. When we need to adjust attitude or change orbit, it takes the computers at NASA and the ESA four hours to develop the program to control all one hundred seventy-six attitude jets so we don’t tear the ISS to pieces. Then it usually takes three hours to execute the program, bringing everything on-line really slowly and tapering off again really slowly, so we don’t tear a few module chains off the central core, or rip a solar-panel wing loose. We’re not designed for dodging.”

Lisa added, “And that says nothing about your isolation module. Even if we could dodge this in time, the module is dangling out there on those cables. It would swing freely and crash into one of the levels, smashing the Atlantis and that lifeform all over the impact site.”

Sam insisted, “Even that would be better than this. If the Envisat hits us at this speed, we’ll both shatter like blown glass. Fragments will go everywhere. That’ll start a chain reaction that will wipe out most of the LEO satellites.”

Oh, crud. Alex said, “Kessler Syndrome.”

Sam nodded. “Exactly.” Then she paused. “How do you know about that? Are you in the hard sciences?”

Vince said, “Even I know about Kessler Syndrome.”

Alex admitted, “I have taken some science courses, and I have some very bright friends.”

*               *               *

Roger McNamara hung on to the arms of his chair. The re-entry was a little bumpy, but going well. And the chair was a lot more comfortable now that he was out of his spacesuit. It wasn’t like the suit would help him any if the X-37 failed during re-entry.

He didn’t bother to keep the smug grin off his face. He had acquired the samples, dealt with the witnesses on the ISS, and taken care of Michael, too. The current plan even had a fairly high chance of taking out that bitch Terawatt. Everything was going perfectly. He and Webb and Markham were going to wait until they were only a couple of miles up, and then they were going to parachute out over north-central Mexico to meet up with the NID group that was waiting for them. The pilot would stay behind to crash the craft several hundred miles downrange and obliterate all the evidence.

The X-37 shook a bit harder. The plastic case holding the alien lifeform samples came loose from its straps and hit the floor hard enough to spring the latch. He looked over and saw that the plastic caps had all failed, and green goop was all over the interior of the case.

He started to yell at Webb to grab the case, but a particularly violent shake hurled handfuls of the green goo into the air.

One of the handfuls hit him right in the side of the face. It felt like it was burning into his skin.

He screamed desperately and clawed at his face, but he couldn’t keep the green ooze from sliding into his mouth and up his nostrils and into his eyes. The pain was unbearable. It was like someone had poured acid into his mouth and under his eyelids. He screamed, and then he choked as he felt some of the ooze moving into his throat …

 
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