Jon Land
The Omega Command
For Professors Elmer Blistein and George Monteiro,
and the English Department of Brown University.
Thanks for taking a chance.
Prologue
“Houston, this is Adventurer.”
“Come in, Adventurer.”
Astronaut Marjorie Rait tightened her grip on the joysticks that controlled the space shuttle’s mechanical robot arm. “Ready to begin satellite retrieval procedures again.”
“Roger, Marge. Here’s to sticky fingers.”
Rait smiled and pushed the right-hand joystick up and to the right, eyes locked on a small television monitor above her; its image was also broadcasted back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. This was the fourth time she had attempted to use the robot arm to bring in the rogue communications satellite for minor repairs; the previous three having failed due to a combination of mechanical breakdown and bad luck. Rait pressed her lips together as she watched her efforts on the screen — the steel arm extended slowly toward the satellite. Since the tragic loss of Challenger, failure had become a nonexistent term in the NASA vocabulary. Too many people were watching, waiting for something else to go wrong. Adventurer had been constructed with precisely that in mind, and its previous two missions had come off without a hitch.
The robot arm was in line with the satellite now. Rait cursed the sweat forming on her brow.
“Looking good, Marge,” came the voice of the Capsule Communicator, better known as Cap-Com.
“Just a little farther,” noted astronaut Gordon Caswell from his post in the shuttle’s open cargo bay. The plan was for the robot arm to deliver the satellite down into it so he could effect repairs. “Easy does it.”
Marjorie Rait manipulated the left-hand joystick to maneuver the arm’s huge pincers, easing them forward. She squeezed her fingers together gently. The pincers closed over the satellite’s lower left pod.
“I’ve got it!” she said.
“Bring her down slow, Marge,” advised the Cap-Com, following the arm’s descent toward the cargo bay on the main Houston television monitor.
“Houston, this is Caswell. Think you boys’ll ever be able to build one of those arms small enough to give a horny astronaut a hand job?”
“Oh, Christ,” came the muffled voice of mission commander Nathan Jamrock in Houston, as he reached into his pocket for a fresh package of Rolaids.
“We’re on an open line here, Gordon,” warned the Cap-Com.
“Musta slipped my mind,” said Caswell.
The satellite was right over him now, coming down directly in line with its slot in the repair bay. Marjorie Rait followed its progress on the monitor, drawing the right-hand joystick straight back now. At 180 miles above Earth’s surface, there would be no comforting sound of metal clicking against metal, not even an echo from the cargo bay to tell her she had been successful. She kept easing the joystick back.
“Bingo,” said Caswell, and Rait allowed herself two deep breaths as her grip loosened on the joystick. Her eyes stayed locked on the monitor, which now pictured Caswell coolly fastening the satellite down so he could begin repairs.
Marge didn’t see the red light flashing on the warning panel directly above her.
“Houston, this is Caswell. I’ve got my toolbox out. Looks like you guys forgot to pack a Phillips head screwdriver.”
“Guess you’ll have to improvise, Gordon.”
“That’s a roger.”
The television monitor now showed Caswell working on the lower right portion of the damaged satellite with what looked like an ordinary socket wrench. After a few seconds he returned this tool to his box and extracted another. All the tools snapped snugly into slots tailored specifically for them to prevent them from rising into the zero gravity of space. The box itself was magnetically sealed to the bay floor and could be moved about in a variety of directions thanks to rollers. Caswell’s motions looked slow and drawn out, due not only to the absence of gravity but also to the need to be precise to the millimeter.
In the cockpit a repeating beep found the ears of Marjorie Rait.
“Oh, my God,” she muttered, looking up finally at the red light flashing on her upper warning panel. “Houston, this is Rait. Sensors have picked something up. Repeat, sensors have picked something up.”
In Houston dozens of technicians turned to panels which were large, virtual replicas of those inside Adventurer. Some of them had been on duty for Challenger, and their boards, albeit less sophisticated, had provided no warning then either.
“Marge,” came the Cap-Com’s calm voice, “we show nothing down here. Probably equipment malfunction. Check your circuits.”
“Negative,” Marge shot back. “Circuits all operative. Something’s coming at us from behind, in line with our orbit.”
Rait felt the icy grip of panic through her space suit. Why didn’t the instruments in Houston show what hers did?
Another warning chime went off on her instrument panel.
“Object closing, Houston. Repeat, object closing!”
“We still read nothing, Adventurer.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Caswell asked, a wrench slipping from his hand and sliding into space. “You guys are starting to make me nervous.”
The voice of mission commander Nathan Jamrock found his ears. “Gordon, look around you. Is there anything out there, an asteroid chunk, a wandering satellite, anything?”
“Nothing out here but us spacemen. All I see is black and — Hey, wait a minute. There is something coming in from the rear. Still a ways off but definitely closing.”
“Can you tell what it is?”
“Negative, Houston. All I caught was what seemed to be a reflector, maybe something blinking. … There it is again.”
“Metallic?”
“Must be.”
There was a brief pause and then Nathan Jamrock’s voice returned. “Gordon, can you reach the television camera?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then raise it in line with whatever’s out there. Let us have a look at it.”
“That’s a roger.”
Jamrock stripped the headset from around his ears and turned to his executive assistant. “Signal a red alert.”
An instant later an alarm began wailing throughout mission control. Personnel rushed to different stations. Satellite tracking procedures were activated all over the world. NORAD, the air defense command in Colorado, was put on line and would now be monitoring all subsequent communications. A call was made to the President. Jamrock chewed another Rolaid.
One hundred eighty miles above Jamrock, Gordon Caswell shuffled toward the television camera mounted at the front of the bay. He had been an all-American running back in college, but speed meant nothing in space. Covering ten yards felt like a thousand, and the harder Caswell pushed, the slower he seemed to move.
In the cockpit Marjorie Rait followed Caswell’s agonizingly deliberate walk as she pressed buttons to ready Adventurer for emergency maneuvers. She had begun to strap herself into the pilot’s seat when the monitor showed Caswell stop in his tracks. She had been an astronaut long enough to know there were no sounds in space. Which made it all the stranger that it seemed to be a sound that made him turn. And then gasp.
“Oh my Christ …”
“Adventurer, this is Houston Cap-Com. What do you see? Repeat, what do you see?” Mission control at the Johnson Space Center had turned silent as a tomb.
Caswell watched the thing in the black air unfold before him as it drew closer.