Still holding on, he pivoted slowly up and around to face the back of the cockpit. One of his knees slammed into Boomer’s helmet. He tightened his hold on the seat as the reaction pushed him away. “Oops,” he muttered, feeling his face redden slightly. He guessed no one would award him a prize for grace and style in zero-G anytime soon. Or ever, McLanahan, his mind scolded, unless you stop screwing around.
Cautiously, he reached out with his right hand, grabbed on to the back of his seat, pulled himself over it, and twisted around again. Then he reached down and grabbed the pull handle set almost flush with the deck between the cockpit seats. At his tug, a section of the deck plating rose smoothly and pivoted away — revealing the deep compartment containing their PLSS life-support gear and Emergency Return from Orbit kits.
Boomer had already unlatched his own harness and turned to face him. He reached out with a gloved hand and took the bulky white backpack Brad gave him. It took them both several minutes to struggle into the backpacks and connect up their umbilical hoses. Instantly, fresh oxygen started flowing to their suits. The red lights on their suit-sleeve environmental control panels turned green.
“Radio check.”
Brad heard Boomer’s voice clearly through his headset. The short-range radios in their backpacks were working. “Roger,” he replied. “Loud and clear. How me?”
“I hear you, too, loud and clear,” Boomer said back. He sighed. “Okay, McLanahan, are you ready to field-test those Rube Goldberg — style Emergency Return from Orbit kits I showed you way back when at Battle Mountain?”
Almost against his will, Brad shot him a crooked grin. “Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.”
“I figured as much,” Brad said. He pulled one of the ERO cases out from the storage compartment and passed it to the other man. Then he took the second kit for himself. Looking again at the weird assortment of gear it contained — the inflatable aerogel-Nomex shell, parachute pack, and twin-nozzle retro-rocket — didn’t exactly inspire confidence. On the other hand, considering that his options boiled down to either rolling the dice with this untested piece of equipment or certain death aboard the crippled S-19 when it hit the atmosphere, maybe that wasn’t such a tough choice after all. And Earth, as it slid across the spaceplane’s cockpit windows, already looked a hell of a lot closer.
Boomer waited for him to float back across his seat and clip on. “Step one is to get these cockpit canopies open. Now, the motors are probably shot to shit. But even if they aren’t, our control switches are, so—”
“We do this the old-fashioned way,” Brad finished for him. He reached out to his side of the cockpit and pulled open a small panel. Inside was an emergency release lever and a manual crank handle to raise the starboard-side canopy. “Right?”
“I’ll give you a gold star when we get down,” Boomer said dryly. He opened an identical panel on his side of the S-19’s cockpit. “Okay, let’s get this done.”
What would have been a comparatively simple task in Earth’s gravity was much more difficult in zero-G. Brad found he had to wedge his booted feet under his seat to get enough traction just to turn the handle. With excruciating slowness, the twin canopies unlatched and cranked open — straining upward into the blackness of space.
“Who gets out first?” Brad grunted, struggling to turn the crank handle for his canopy.
“I already tossed that coin in my mind,” Boomer said, sounding equally exhausted. “You won.”
Brad forced a smile. “What’s this? Noble by last name, noble by nature?”
“Hell no,” Boomer retorted. “This is more like callow youth before crafty veteran. This way, I figure if you screw up somehow, I get a shot at seeing what went wrong in time to do better.”
“Fair enough,” Brad agreed. He tilted his helmet toward the open canopy, waiting as the earth, which now filled their whole view, twirled away out of sight, leaving only stars in its wake. The gap looked wide enough. There was no percentage in waiting any longer. He unclipped from the seat and triggered a short burst from his backpack’s emergency maneuvering system. With the ERO clutched to his chest, he soared out into space — clearing the edge of the canopy with only inches to spare.
Another quick burst from the gas jets altered his trajectory, sending him corkscrewing away from the S-19’s aft fuselage as it spun past on its descent toward the atmosphere. More finger taps on the maneuvering controls turned him around so that he could see the world below. He was so close now that its clouds and forests and mountains filled his whole field of view — growing larger and more defined with every passing second as he curved east and down at more than seventeen thousand miles per hour.
“Some view, huh?” he heard Boomer radio. The other man’s space suit was visible only as a bright speck of reflected sunlight several miles away on their orbital track.
“I liked it a whole lot more from inside a working spacecraft,” Brad admitted ruefully.
“Yeah, me too.” Hissing static overlaid Boomer’s words. They were already near the outside edge of the range of their low-powered radio gear and separating fast. “So we’ll build our own. Now get to it, Brad… and good…” The static grew louder and louder until it drowned out every other sound.
“Good luck to you, too,” Brad said softly, knowing the other man was already too far away to hear him. He switched the radio off. Since no other human being was within its limited range, there was no point in wasting battery power. For a brief, terrifying moment, he experienced the sudden, overwhelming sensation of being utterly and completely alone — totally cut off from everyone he knew and loved. If this emergency reentry went wrong, no one would ever really know what had happened to him. He’d simply vanish, like a shooting star that streaked across the night sky for one brief moment and then disappeared forever in a split-second flash of bright golden light.
Abruptly, he shook his head in self-reproach. Whine when you’re back on the ground, McLanahan, he thought grimly, not now.
It took some doing to open and empty the clear ERO case without putting his suit into a spin. At last, though, Brad managed it.
Equally careful and precise movements allowed him to unfold the disk-shaped aerogel shell so that its thin Nomex cloth heat shield faced the earth below. Cautiously, he maneuvered into position inside the uninflated shell, strapped the parachute pack to his suit, and tightened his hold on the little handheld rocket motor. Then, satisfied that he was as close to the exact center as he could get, he activated a pair of pressurized containers. Instantly, expandable polyurethane foam spewed out of their nozzles — inflating the six-foot-diameter bag around him.
Within seconds, the foam had hardened, locking him snugly in place. And what had been a disk of ultrathin, ultrastrong material now had a conical dish shape.
Brad looked up at the star-speckled black depths above him and then took a deep breath. There was no sense in putting this off any longer. Sure, he was already on a course to deorbit anyway, but their derelict S-19 Midnight was on that same basic trajectory… and it was bound to break up on reentry, shredding into a massive fireball composed of thousands of burning fragments. It would be a whole lot better to drop out of orbit far, far away from where the spaceplane was doomed to meet its own fiery end.
Here goes, he thought. Next stop, Earth… or oblivion.
He squeezed the retro-rocket trigger.
At first, the ride was undramatic. When the rockets fired, he only saw two quick puffs of vapor and felt a tiny jolt… about the same as if someone had dropped a five-pound weight on his stomach. But the velocity decrease was just enough to steepen his descent, further tightening gravity’s grip on his improvised reentry capsule. For long moments, though, nothing seemed to be happening. Since he couldn’t see the world growing beneath his heat shield, Brad had no visible frame of reference and no way to judge his relative motion.