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“You’re comingin way too hot, Andreyev. You need to adjust your pitch.”
The reentry profile through Earth’s atmosphere had been too steep to begin with. Sasha gritted his teeth as he fought the controls, theEclipse’s control stick shuddering in his clenched fist. He’d gone three-quarters of an aggressive loop around Earth, launching from the ISS and around the polar orbit, then slicing down the thermosphere over Alaska and pointing for Cape Canaveral. He was too fast, too aggressive. He needed to bleed speed, burn electrons off his shielding as he shredded the mesosphere on his descent.
And then the OMS engines flared out on him, punching theEclipsedown at too steep an angle. He was falling too fast, a brick smashing atoms instead of gliding between them. Plasma flared off his heat shield, trailing behind his windows like he was flying down the gullet of a roaring dragon.
Red master alarm lights strobed, fireworks catching a bead of sweat falling from Sasha’s forehead and refracting the light. A countdown timer blinked at him in the upper corner of the pilot’s command console.
Commander Mark Keating should be there with him to guide theEclipse, NASA’s fourth Orion spacecraft, back to Earth. Their crew should be behind him calling out readings, everyone working as a team for a successful reentry.
But it was only Sasha inside theEclipse.
Launch immediatelywas the order from Houston.There’s nothing more we can do for them.
You’re on your own.
Catastrophic mission failure.
Sole survivor.
His teeth clenched, his jaw aching. TheEclipsebucked, shearing through the upper atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour. Ionized air roasted the spacecraft, the coronal glow of his reentry streaking a multimile tail of rainbow fire as electrons tore out of their orbits in the face of his reckless descent.
Sasha’s gaze darted to Mark’s empty seat beside him. His own chair trembled, bouncing on its bolts like it was trying to shake his organs loose, break every bone in his body.
“Andreyev, you’re too steep!” Mission Control, in his ear, sounded frantic. He could hear the caffeine pitch of their panic, the edge of too little sleep. “You have to adjust your gamma!”
The Orion spaceship was not the orbiter, the famed Space Shuttle of the turn of the millennium. The orbiter didn’t quite fly, but it could glide all the way through the atmosphere to the extralong runways it needed for its return to Earth. The Orion-era spacecraft were modeled on the earliest Apollo designs: gumdrop crew modules on top of staged rockets for ascent, and thrusters and parachutes that slowed the crew modules’ reentry before dropping them to Earth in a controlled fall. The landings were supposed to be gentler than the old Apollo missions.
There wasn’t much Sasha could do about his approach. His reentry had been flawed to begin with. His OMS engine flare-out turned into an APU failure and then a GCS shutdown.
He was freefalling, plunging through the sky with only his hands on the stick. Since the first days of spaceflight, computers had calculated and controlled reentry and descent for every spacefaring crew. No human was capable of the complex vectors, the brilliantly supersonic speeds, the hemisphere-long targeting and approach required to bring a craft in from orbit to touch down on a target the size of a football field.
Another alarm pierced the cabin. Crimson lights screamed, going off on multiple panels above and below him. “Houston, engine fire! There’s a fuel leak in the M-E!”
He snapped switches and silenced the alarms.ENGINE FIREpulsed at him in thick, blocky letters. Hydrazine was leaking somewhere in the main engines beneath him. In the inferno of reentry, it had caught fire.
It was a wonder he hadn’t blown up yet.
“Confirm, Andreyev, M-E fire. Shut down fuel lines to M-E.”
“Houston, shut down fuel lines to main engine.” Sasha took one hand off the convulsing control stick and snapped three switches, choking the fuel lines from the main tank. He watched the tanks’ gauges. “Still falling, Houston! Leak not contained!”
TheEclipsebucked like he was finally riding the mechanical bull in the back of Freddy’s Bar in South Houston, the hangout where all the astronauts went. Mark had tried to get him up on that thing for years.
Another jerk, this one harder than the others. His temple slammed against the side of his helmet. Outside the windows, blue sky appeared, replacing the fires of reentry. “Houston, Mach 25. 340,000 feet.”
“Descent angle still too steep, Andreyev. You’re going to shear apart.”
Every bone in his body felt like it was going to snap. His skull pushed back on his helmet, his helmet on the seat. His arms were too heavy. He felt the edge of blackness creep in at the sides of his eyes. Tunnel vision. Impending blackout.
No.
Sasha clenched down on his gut and bore down with his legs, his abs, forced his core to clench, to shunt blood back up. He fought against the multi-g-forces straining against him. “Mach 20. 200,000 feet,” he grunted.
He jiggled the control stick. “Houston, I have minimal control on board!” He slammed his thumb down on the BFS controls, the backup flight system, the emergency controls for a dead-stick bird. “BFS inoperative! Stick responds sluggishly.”
“Roger, Andreyev. The fire must have eaten through your controls.”
