Holdout

Chapter One

August 21; 11:02 a.m. Station Time

Walli Beckwith had no way of knowing that she probably had just under an hour to live. If she had known, she likely could have calculated exactly how much under an hour it was. By now she understood well-nigh all there was to know about how a spacecraft at a particular distance with a particular mass moving at a particular speed behaves, so she could also understand precisely when the one coming at her would arrive and what it would do when it hit. But the spacecraft was, at the moment, keeping all that a secret from Beckwith, as well as from the other two crew members aboard the International Space Station. If a mindless machine with no one aboard could be said to be acting with devious intent, this one was-and its intent was to kill them all.

The machine that was threatening to end the crew's lives would also make a mess of an experiment Beckwith was conducting, one that she'd rather looked forward to completing but now probably never would, what with death all at once on the day's menu of events. For most of the morning, she had been working in the station's Zarya, or Sunrise, laboratory-one of the five modules the Russians had contributed to the football-field-size, fifteen-module station. Lost in the experiment, she jumped when a voice suddenly called out to her over the station's intercom system for a routine status check. Most communications aboard the station were conducted publicly, over speakers and microphones arrayed throughout the modules, sparing the crew from having to wear headsets all day.

"Are you all right back there, Walli?" the voice, belonging to the station commander, Vasily Zhirov, called in Russian-accented English.

"All good," she answered.

"You didn't catch the shit bug?"

"Not yet," Beckwith said with a laugh.

Zhirov's English was better than Beckwith's Russian, so that was how they typically communicated. Still, he chose his moments to speak in Russian, and for "shit bug," which was how he always referred to the E. coli intestinal bacteria that was used in the lab studies, he used "derm—vaya zaraza." In either language, the term was one of the many ways Zhirov had of waving off the science that was conducted aboard the station, which, as far as he could see, was busywork compared to the more challenging business of simply keeping the huge ship flying. When the experiment involved salmonella, Zhirov called it kur’naya bolŽzn, or chicken sickness, and any studies involving the five mice aboard the station were krysinie ’gri, or rat games.

Earlier in the morning, Beckwith had been running E. coli studies, but she had finished up that work and was now starting on an experiment with meningitis bacteria, a more important job since it was being done in pursuit of a better treatment for the disease; it was the kind of experiment that made her feel her time in space was being especially well spent. As she worked, she could listen in on what Zhirov and the other Russian aboard, Yulian Lebedev, were doing.

The station had been shorthanded for the past two weeks, ever since the last three-person crew had returned to Earth to make way for the next. The newcomers would be arriving in ten days, filling out the crew manifest to the more typical six. Before they arrived, the station needed to be resupplied. An unmanned Progress cargo vehicle had been launched from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan two days ago and was scheduled to arrive and dock with the station at just after 11:00 this morning, station time, which was pegged to Greenwich Mean Time.

Docking a Progress had its perils. Without a pilot aboard, it relied on a computer to execute the delicate pas de deux of approaching and linking up with the station. But computers were imperfect, and for that reason, Zhirov and Lebedev, the two Russians aboard, who presumably had a better understanding of the Progress than the one American, would be in the nearby Pirs, or Pier, module, a downward-facing pod barely half the length of the school-bus-size Zarya. The nose of the Progress would fit into a port on the Pirs, a routine procedure that had been conducted uncounted times before. Still, the two cosmonauts would be monitoring the Progress's approach and could take over and fly it in by remote control if the automatic guidance system failed. The dual Mission Controls in Moscow and Houston would be listening in on the procedure, but it was Zhirov and Lebedev who would do the piloting if a problem arose.

Beckwith had little doubt that the likes of those two would bring off the docking without incident. Lebedev was a first-time cosmonaut and a quiet sort, but over the course of the last two years of training together, she'd come to see him as the best pure engineer she'd ever met. People liked to say that he could take the entire Russian portion of the space station apart in his head, redesign it, and put it back together better than it had been before. That had seemed like nothing more than the kind of hyperbolic praise ladled out to promising rookies until Beckwith saw Lebedev do just that-staring at a busted evaporator or a broken-down air scrubber, regarding it this way and that, then finally nodding once as he sorted out exactly what it needed and fixing it within minutes.

Zhirov was another order of exceptional altogether. He'd been to space five times before, putting together 780 days off the planet as of this morning's count. He'd already made it clear he was aiming for a full thousand, and at this point, he would need just one more flight after the current one to get there. It was all but certain he would, what with the press attention it would garner. The Russians were already working on a publicity campaign for what they would call the "Zolot‡ya Tysyacha," or the "Golden Thousand."

Zhirov had earned his thousand. He was widely considered the most gifted natural pilot in the Russian space program, a master of the three-person Soyuz spacecraft-which he adored. It was so light, so responsive, so zippy a ride up and so buckingly wild a ride back down that anyone who had ever been at the stick of one would never want to fly anything else. Zhirov liked to boast that while the other two crew members in a Soyuz were expected to assist the commander during flight, he could fly the thing with two cabbages in the other two seats.

Beckwith was proud of her own 153 days in space, accumulated over the course of a two-week space shuttle mission early in her NASA career, a three-month space station rotation three years ago, and the seven weeks she'd spent aboard the station on this rotation. But they felt like little more than a long weekend compared to Zhirov's total. She was thus delighted to have been assigned a full six months this time around.

Now, as Zhirov and Lebedev monitored the approaching Progress, Beckwith went about her laboratory work. A freezer tray of meningitis floated in front of her; she extracted one sample vial and broke its seal carefully, half listening to the call-and-response chatter between the cosmonauts and the ground. She could tell that the Progress was drawing closer.

"Target at forty-five, closing at twenty-six," Lebedev called to Moscow Mission Control. They spoke in Russian, but it was pilots' Russian, and in that, at least, Beckwith was fluent. During the docking, it would be Zhirov's job to monitor the approach data as it changed, Lebedev's job to announce it to the ground.

"Copy your forty-five and twenty-six," Moscow answered.

The changing numbers were also reassuring numbers. At this moment, the Progress was forty-five kilometers, or twenty-eight miles, below and behind the station, approaching at twenty-six meters per second, or fifty-eight miles per hour. Throughout the docking, both numbers would get steadily smaller as the Progress drew closer and moved slower. Beckwith glanced at her watch. The Progress would have to slow to a few meters and then a few tenths of a meter per second in order to come in slowly enough to insert its prow into the station's docking collar safely. Still, at the speed it was traveling, it would close most of the distance fast, and under normal circumstances the whole exercise would be over in less than forty-five minutes.

As if in recognition of that narrow window of time, the patter between the station and the ground took on a brisker clip.

"Forty-five kilometers, closing at twenty-four," Lebedev said.

"Forty-five and twenty-four," Moscow echoed.

The speed then slowed to twenty-two meters per second, then twenty, then eighteen, and then just fifteen. And then it did something it very much was not supposed to do, which is to say it did nothing at all.

"Holding at fifteen," Lebedev said.

Three seconds passed.

"Holding at fifteen," Lebedev repeated.

"Copy your fifteen," Moscow said. Even through the air-to-ground static, Beckwith could hear that the voice from Moscow had tightened. Several seconds elapsed with only the communications hiss playing through the station's intercom.

"And now twenty," Zhirov said, taking over Lebedev's callout role. His tone was hard, almost a snap.

Beckwith looked up. Zhirov couldn't mean twenty. Twenty meant that the Progress was accelerating-precisely what it wasn't supposed to do, precisely what no incoming vessel was ever supposed to do at this close range when it was heading for the huge, slow, barely maneuverable station.

"Repeat please, station," Moscow requested.

"Yes," Zhirov said. "Twenty."

Beckwith stopped what she was doing. Zhirov spoke again.

"Twenty-three," he said flatly, and then, "Twenty-eight."

"Go to manual override, station," Moscow called.

"Copy, override," Zhirov answered. Beckwith waited to hear Zhirov say that the override had worked, that the speed had been braked. But Zhirov did not say that.

What he said instead-flatly, tonelessly-was: "Moscow, we have no hand."

That was the call Beckwith had dreaded. "No hand" was a term of Zhirov's own devising. It was the one he first used during preflight training when the simulation supervisors threw him just this scenario-a Progress vehicle speeding toward the station, its onboard computer, backup systems, manual control, and every other intended fail-safe having in fact failed. A commander without a hand on his ship was a commander in the worst kind of trouble.

Beckwith sprang toward the end of the Zarya lab that led to the docking module, then doubled back-her open vial of meningitis still in her hand and the sample tray floating where she'd left it. She forced the top back on the vial, banged it back into place in the tray, pivoted toward the freezer, and clumsily slid the tray inside, slamming the door too hard, then slamming it again when it failed to catch. Then she kicked herself off a bulkhead, shot toward the lab exit, and dove down into the open hatch of the Pirs, which was just below her.

When she entered, Zhirov and Lebedev had their backs to her, facing the module's instrument panel and the small windows that looked down toward the planet. Through the windows, Beckwith could see the dark shape of the Progress approaching against the white of the clouds. It was just three kilometers away now, or a little under two miles, and big enough for her almost to make out its shape, though at that distance, the twenty-three-foot-long multiton vessel still looked relatively harmless. The view on the monitors in front of Lebedev and Zhirov told a different story. One showed the Progress as seen from a camera on the far larger station; the other showed the station as seen from the Progress. On the screen, the station resembled nothing so much as a vast butterfly, its two giant solar arrays forming the butterfly's wings, dwarfing the chain of fifteen linked modules between them that made up its body. The Progress was closing on it like an angry wasp.

"Vasily," Beckwith said, announcing her presence.

Zhirov, his hand on the useless control stick and his eyes fixed on the screens, nodded without turning.

"Target is accelerating, Moscow," he said levelly. "We are at thirty."

Beckwith did some hurried calculating and swallowed hard at what the numbers told her: Thirty meters per second meant that the Progress was up to sixty-seven miles per hour. An impact, if one was to occur, would now take place in just three minutes. Lebedev, as if following her ciphering, confirmed it three seconds later.

"One hundred seventy-seven seconds," he read out. The images on the twin screens grew bigger.

"Station, recycle please," Moscow called up, ordering Zhirov to, effectively, reboot the guidance system by switching it off and then back on again.

"Recycle," Zhirov commanded Lebedev, who flicked the appropriate switches in front of him off and then on. Zhirov tried his control handle-and the images on the screen continued to grow.

"No hand, Moscow," Zhirov said.

"Recycle again please," Moscow said.

Lebedev complied and Zhirov tried the controls.

"No hand, Moscow," he said.

"Again, station," Moscow ordered. Again Lebedev tried.

"Moscow-we-have-no-hand!" Zhirov said in an impatient staccato. "We will evade." He then turned back to Beckwith. "Walli, thrusters," he ordered.

"Copy, Vasily," she said, then flew from the docking module, and made a sharp turn into a larger adjacent module the Russians called the Zvezda, or Star, where the station's thrusters were controlled. She threw the breakers that powered the system and feathered the control handle to determine if it was engaged. Thrusters made no noise in space, but within the ship, the power of their exhaust vibrated through the walls and was very much audible. Aboard the American space shuttle, thrusters went off with a sound like a shotgun that left no mistake they were functioning. On the station, they produced a much softer whoosh. Walli heard the whoosh. During routine station maneuvers it was actually a pleasing sound. Today it signaled only looming disaster.

"Engaged, Vasily," she said grimly through the open intercom system.

"Pitch up and yaw starboard," Zhirov ordered, telling Beckwith, effectively, to raise and bank the station.

"One hundred and thirty seconds," Lebedev said.

"Roger," Beckwith said and obeyed, but her stomach turned over at the particular evasive maneuver Zhirov had ordered; it was an acknowledgment that a collision was unavoidable. The station turned lazily and could not easily get out of harm's way in time. Instead, the pitch and yaw would simply reposition it, putting one of the great solar wings in the path of the Progress and avoiding damage to any of the modules that made up the main body of the butterfly, which could lead to a lethal depressurization. Zhirov was trading a mortal wound for a flesh wound. The station lurched upward and to the right.