Smoke exploded from beneath the shuttle’s body upon touchdown. Still nose up, its stout body swayed left on its rear tires and James jerked his arms down as he leaned to his right. “Come on, come on,” he chanted.
Endeavour dropped forward and embraced the ground finally, but continued to drift toward the left edge of the road. The drag chute snapped out and wagged violently, a huge gray blossom.
At speeds in excess of two hundred miles per hour, the shuttle reached the bridge while James was still caught in his dance. He’d become quite a student of the technology during the past weeks, and had spoken reassuringly to each of his bigwig contacts about carbon brakes and nosewheel steering capabilities. He had been repeating that same mantra to himself all morning but now he kept begging, “Come on—”
The pilot brought his hurtling craft back from the left margin, back from the dirt embankments and disaster.
It was that excellent reflex that doomed Endeavour.
There had been an inch-and-a-half drop from the highway asphalt to the concrete slab of the bridge, the result of a repaving effort three years prior. Army engineers noted it while making their improvements. For a car the bump was marginal, barely enough to slosh a cup of coffee, but they had recognized that the shuttle’s weight and phenomenal speed would amplify any defect, and smoothed the surface with fresh tar. NASA pad rats had approved the work and warned the ISS crew.
Endeavour hit the new patch with its nose wheel slightly cockeyed. Even so the accident was one in a thousand. The front end bounced heavily and the wings were carried up on a gust of wind. The pull of the drag chute increased the drift.
On a normal runway there would have been room to correct. Instead the shuttle, lurching to the right now, clipped four inches of its starboard wing through the boxy cab of a yellow Colorado Springs fire engine. The roof and doors of the vehicle tore away in a brilliant shower of glass and plastic shards. Endeavour lost only a few white panels of its heat shielding.
Impact, however, brought the nose of the spacecraft farther to the right. Endeavour plowed through an ambulance and another fire truck before it cartwheeled over the embankment.
15
Ruth was the only one who panicked. Gus had her unbuckled before she even realized they’d stopped moving. Her inner ear and every muscle spun with the forgotten sensation of down as terror shot through her laboring heart, which seemed to be trying to jump free from her chest.
“Get out, Gus, we have to get out!”
Down felt all the more wrong for the sideways tilt of the shuttle’s crew cabin. She grabbed at him as she flopped forward, weak and clumsy. Her faceplate clunked against his orange pressure suit. They were all fully armored, in case Endeavour’s long wait in vacuum had resulted in subtle damages and the pressure blew out; in case it became necessary to reroute for Denver International, deep within the invisible sea; in case any of a dozen scenarios that the NASA team had game-planned.
The voices in her helmet were quick, deliberate, too much overlapping jargon to process: “Evacuate not responding control med med power-off.”
Gus dragged her toward the side hatch, bumping after Deb. Fortunately the floor tipped in that direction.
His mouth moved and she realized that two of the words resounding through her head were his. “Hang on,” he said, but pushed her away.
Deb had stepped onto the interdeck ladder, and Ruth caught one of the struts. Deb kept climbing toward the flight deck.
Ruth looked after her, shocked that she would move away from the exit. She would block the way for Ulinov and Mills and Wallace to get down. “What—” Each shallow breath was an aching. Her breasts and ribs felt like a badly used drum. Reentry had been rough but she was pretty sure the whole shuttle had rolled a few times at the end.
Impact, Mills had announced on the radio. One word. Ruth guessed there hadn’t been time for more.
It had been nothing but guessing since she strapped into her chair down here for the initial burn, ninety-some minutes ago. You’d have to be superhuman not to be scared. Mills had kept up a running commentary for their benefit, but Ruth, Gus, and Doc Deb had been relegated to the crew cabin beneath the flight deck, blind in a box, an elevator in an earthquake.
Ruth was definitely not superhuman. There had been a time, at the height of her success, when she would have accepted a bet to do this alone in radio silence or even strapped outside on the wing, damn it, but that brash steamroller of a girl had left her, giving way to claustrophobia and fear.
Deborah gasped on the radio: “Derek, oh—”
“Get back down that ladder.” Ulinov might have been asking for tea, his voice as composed as Mills’s had been.
Impact.
Once upon a time, postlanding operations had involved well over twenty specially designed vehicles and a hundred experts whose first action was to test the shuttle’s exterior for toxic and/or explosive residual gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen tetroxide. The astronauts remained inside while a Vapor Dispersal Unit fanned away potential hazards, and soon afterward Purge and Coolant Vehicles began a more thorough job of making the shuttle safe. The payload bay especially, where Ruth’s records and nanotech gear were stored, tended to fill with fumes.
Leadville had only a jury-rigged wind machine and civilian firefighting trucks. The NASA team had been anxious about dealing with a successful touchdown.
Ruth was inside a bomb.
One spark from a sheared wire, or the terrible heat of the engines — it was crucial to escape the vehicle that had saved them. There was no chance Endeavour would be obliterated in a titanic ball of flame, since most of the excess fuel was burned off during reentry as a safety precaution, but a flash fire would still roast them well enough.
Gus opened the hatch and Ruth shoved against him as the massive coin of the door dropped down, sticking out from the side of the shuttle like a round plank. Normally it would have been ten feet above ground but the Endeavour seemed to have ridden up a hill, so that although this side of the craft tipped down, the gouged earth dropped away to match. Below them were green shrubs, torn and smashed— The peeled-apart tire of a car— And two men in black firefighter jackets, yelling and waving their arms—
Ruth shoved again but Gus stayed in the opening to deploy the thermal apron, which would protect them from the hot exterior tiles. And in those unbearable extra seconds, the conversation in her helmet at last penetrated her lunatic fear.
Ulinov: “Evacuate Dr. Goldman now.”
“Your leg.” Deb again. “Bill?”
“I’m busy.”
“Get back down that ladder.”
Deb said, “I need help up here.”
“No. Evacuate now.”
“Okay, go go go,” Gus said, and he went through. The two firefighters had been joined by a soldier and an EMT in white, all of them shouting and waving.
The bravery of these men was striking. They had run toward the bomb. Without equipment, without any of their plans intact, they had run into danger for her.
Deb’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I have three wounded on the flight deck, one critical.”
Ruth could have saved herself. She should have. It was exactly how they’d trained for this moment — yet she hesitated at the brink of safety.
Like the first responders on the ground outside, the ISS crew had gambled everything for her. They had sacrificed their families and their homes. Gus and Ulinov had abandoned their countries just to serve her. If she left them now, she might never recover from the decision. The impulse to sabotage the space station and force this landing, no matter that she hadn’t acted on it, had damaged her in ways that could never be erased.