Orbital Maneuvers Read online

  Orbital

  Maneuvers

  Copyright © 2010 RC Davison

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner what so ever without the written permission of the publisher.

  Printed by Create Space

  ISBN: 1451549431

  EAN-13: 9781451549430

  Cover artwork by RC Davison

  Crescent Image of Earth is courtesy of NASA

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to take a moment to thank a few special people that have helped me bring this project to life.

  First and foremost, there is my wife, Mervet. She has been my sounding board, proofreader, consultant, and advisor, on top of everything else she does to make our household function. This book would not have happened without her loving support on many levels.

  Second, I would like to thank my sisters (-in-law) Mona and Margo: Mona, for her patience, endless hours proofreading early revisions of the story, website support, and offering valuable suggestions that helped me see the story from the reader’s perspective. Margo (and Sharif), for their great feedback and support, which was instrumental in bringing the companion website online.

  Third, I would like to thank my editor, Anne Dantz ([email protected]), for all her efforts. Her creative input and concise editing helped to bring the novel to life. Anne’s attention to the smallest details, whether they were in the story line or character development, always amazed me. Her suggestions for alternate wordings oftentimes were exactly what I was striving for, but just could not put into words as I was writing. I have learned a lot during the process of editing the manuscript because of her efforts, not only with respect to the mechanics of writing, but also to the creative aspects of writing. If you’re looking for a freelance editor, I’d highly recommend her.

  Finally, I would also like to thank you, the reader, for taking some of your time, and your hard earned money, to explore the creation of an unknown author. I hope I exceed your expectations. Enjoy the story.

  -RC Davison

  FIVE MAJOR EXTINCTIONS SUFFERED ON PLANET EARTH *

  •439 million years ago: Ordovician-Silurian extinction. Twenty-five percent of marine families and 60 percent of marine genera destroyed.

  •364 million years ago: Devonian extinction. Twenty-two percent of marine families and fifty-seven percent marine genera destroyed. Extent of destruction of land animals: unknown.

  •251 million years ago: Permian-Triassic extinction. Ninety-five percent of all species destroyed.

  •208 million years ago: End Triassic extinction. Twenty-two percent of marine families and fifty-two percent of marine genera destroyed. Vertebrate deaths are unclear.

  •65 million years ago: Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. Sixteen percent of marine families, forty-seven percent of marine genera and eighteen percent of land vertebrate families, including the dinosaurs, destroyed.

  Present day: Quaternary Period—“The age of man”

  Astronomers predict a close approach by the asteroid, Apophis, in 2029 with the possibility of impact in 2036 - The Quaternary extinction.

  * Reference: Doug Erwin, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/extinction_sidebar_000907.html)

  Orbital Maneuvers

  I

  Susan hung motionless in the warm, sapphire blue water. Rays of sunlight pierced the water and danced with the wavelets on the surface as they passed overhead. The only sound she could hear was her heart beating a slow relaxed rhythm in time to the dancing sunbeams. Faintly, she could make out clicks and chirps followed by an occasional thump and what sounded like a splash or whooshing noise—like a million bubbles bursting at once. She pirouetted in the liquid blue turning toward the sound and staring off into the distance. She could see light blue above, dark blue to ebony black below, and azure to the deepest, richest royal blue surrounding her. Like swimming in the Hope diamond, she thought. The sounds drew closer and she strained to localize the direction they were coming from. Still not knowing what was coming, she felt at peace and quite content to hang in this beautiful sea admiring the infinite shades of blue that played around her. Susan decided that blue was her favorite color.

  The clicks and chirps grew louder and more frequent, accompanied by more thumps, splashes and the rush of millions of bursting bubbles. Out of the deep blue she could finally make out shadows moving and playing among the sunbeams and sliding in and out of the blue veils of water. A small pod of bottlenose dolphins finally emerged from the dark blue shadows and swam toward Susan as if she were the object of their search. They split up and darted around her, watched her with their inquisitive black eyes and perpetual smiles. Eventually they approached Susan close enough to touch her with their fins or nuzzle her with their beaks and she gently reached out and stroked their smooth gray skin. The dolphins dove deep beside her only to shoot up past her on the other side and to launch themselves into the air at the surface doing somersaults and spins. With each entry back into the water she saw the clouds of bubbles form and burst, gently caressing her ears. She was very delighted with her new playmates. It was only when she saw them surface for air that she realized that she did not have to. Nor was she wearing any scuba gear, or clothes for that matter, yet she felt no discomfort, no burning desire to get to the surface to take in a much needed breath of air. That was odd, she thought. But at the moment she chose not to dwell on it, as she was enjoying the water and her new friends too much.

  After a fashion the largest of the dolphins stopped in front of Susan and gazed deep into her eyes. Susan wondered if it were trying to tell her something. Susan could not decide which it was but she immediately felt a chill run through her. The dolphin’s gaze lingered for a few more moments and with several loud chirps the pod reformed, circled Susan several times, darted away and returned only to repeat this new dance several more times. Susan did not know what to do. They seemed to be trying to tell her something but she could not translate the language of their dance or read any meaning in their fixed smiles. She hung in the water as the pod circled her slowly one last time. Once more the largest dolphin paused to look into her eyes and then with a low series of clicks, the pod swam to the surface for one more leap into the air, dove past Susan into the dark blue below, then down into the ebony black of the deep.

  All was silent again: no clicks, no splashes, no rush of bubbles. The only sound she could hear was the beating of her heart, much more rapidly now than before. Susan began feeling more and more uncomfortable. A sense of apprehension drew upon her like a cloud blotting out the sun. She fought back the panic that started to rise deep in her stomach and began to search around looking for some sign of the impending danger. There was no noise, no indication, no warning. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Susan saw a black shadow approaching! The shadow loomed out of the darkness, hurtling toward her at an unbelievable speed for its size. She tried to swim to the surface as the massive black object rushed toward her. Susan looked over her shoulder while she struggled through the viscous water. In her panic, all she could see was a massive, scarred, black fin and a lifeless black eye. It pierced her through to her very soul: sucking the energy from her body. She tried to swim faster but the beast bore down upon her until the sunbeams were extinguished, and the liquid blue turned to solid black as the beast engulfed her...

  Susan awoke in a panic, struggling against the restraints that kept her from floating out of her sleeping bag and about the cabin. She looked around and saw there was no liquid sapphire blue or solid black to be seen. There was no beast crushing her and no water suffocating her. Her breathing was beginning to slow down as she wiped the sweat
from her forehead hoping that no one heard her struggling through her nightmare. Not the kind of thing a mission commander would want the crew to know about.

  Susan released the restraints from her sleeping bag and floated freely. Checking the time, she saw she had an hour before Mission Control would officially wake them up. She floated silently from the flight deck, where she chose to sleep last night, to the middeck and weaved her way past her sleeping crew to the personal hygiene compartment. This was one of the few places on the shuttle where one could have any privacy. Once inside, she tried to compose herself. Cleaning up in space wasn’t quite as refreshing as a good shower was on Earth, but for the moment it helped Susan calm down and collect her thoughts. She gathered up her unruly hair, twisted it into a bun, and secured it with a scrunchie. She still had that gnawing in the pit of her stomach, not quite as bad as before but it bothered her nonetheless. Susan tried to focus on the busy day they had ahead of them. She wanted it to go as smoothly as the rest of the mission had gone. The launch went perfectly and the rendezvous with the International Space Station to drop off the Crew Return Vehicle, or CRV as it was more commonly known, went mostly by the book. They also unloaded the supplies the station needed to support a full station crew compliment of seven that were going to arrive next month on the shuttle Atlantis and a Russian Soyuz capsule. Now that the CRV was at the station, they would be able to evacuate all seven crewmembers at once, if needed. Today they had to rendezvous with the science experiment satellite, SCIEXSAT, to remove some samples that have been in orbit for a year. After that task was completed they had some public relations broadcasts to do and then they would prepare the shuttle for tomorrow’s reentry.

  As Susan thought about the day’s tasks she felt the pain in the pit of her stomach increase in intensity. The pain did not bother her—she knew it wasn’t a pain that came from a biological cause—it was the sense of foreboding that accompanied the pain that disturbed her more. The discomfort brought Susan back to a time as a child when she had a terrible dream, and the same sensation of pain and foreboding.

  Growing up in a close family, with grandparents always around sharing the chores and responsibilities of raising her and her two brothers, gave Susan an appreciation of family not too many eleven-year old children had. She was especially close to her grandfather. He spent much of his free time reading to her. She could listen to him for hours as he read her all the classics of literature, the comics, or told her stories of his youth. It was always a treat to come home from school and find her grandparents waiting, eager to hear about her day’s activities, and to share a snack.

  One night, Susan had a dream in which her grandfather was sailing away, leaving her all alone on the beach of a deserted island. Susan awoke in a panic, covered in sweat and with a strange pain in her stomach. The vision of the dream haunted her while she lay awake in bed trying to get back to sleep. It was so unlike Grandpa to ignore her. No matter how much she called to him he just sailed farther and farther out to sea with dolphins swimming beside the boat. Finally, she could take no more and with the ache in her stomach still there she ran to her grandparent’s room. Seeing them sleeping soundly, she returned to bed assured that her grandparents were all right—yet the ache in her stomach persisted.

  The next day Susan learned that her grandparents were to leave on a trip and she felt the wave of pain and apprehension recur. She told her grandfather about the dream and asked him to stay. She begged him not to go, not to leave her. Susan remembered how he laughed at her and told her that he would be back in a few weeks to finish Black Beauty, the latest book he was reading to her. The feelings she felt just grew worse when they left and Susan knew, deep down, that she would never see them again. Her fears became reality as the plane her grandparents were on crashed while landing on their return flight. The pain and fear that nightmare planted in Susan never returned, until last night.

  It took many months for her to accept the loss of her grandparents and many years before she stopped anticipating hearing their voices when she got home from school. Right now, Susan found herself yearning for the soothing sound of her grandfather’s voice reading Black Beauty to her. Right now, she wished she were anywhere but on this shuttle.

  II

  Susan floated over to a porthole and looked out at the blue Atlantic Ocean covered with clouds that looked like puffs of cotton. How small and fragile Earth looked from orbit, like a piece of hand-painted porcelain, so delicate and beautiful. Her gaze drifted from the deep blue of the water to the deep black of the horizon. There was always something very sinister and threatening in the blackness of spaces where one could not see everything that was hidden in shadow. Susan realized that she was experiencing the same feelings that she had had as a child looking into her bedroom closet on long, hot summer nights, just as the light was fading in the room and the crickets’ songs grew louder. The blackness she now stared into was infinite, so deep, so ominous that Susan could not turn her eyes away. Maybe if she stared long enough she could see what was out there and just maybe the ache in her stomach would go away.

  Space is so infinite, distances so huge, sizes so massive and time so old that one has no option but to use terms that are measureless in characterization to describe it. It is in this realm that things happen just because there is enough time or just enough space for them to happen. The odds of a star going supernova and shredding the planets that peacefully orbited it for billions of years are small. The odds of it going supernova and blowing one chunk of the debris in just the right direction so that a billion years later it would enter the gravitational pull of our Sun and its path be deflected just enough to intercept the third planet from the Sun, are astronomically small. Astronomically small, yes, but not zero! Given enough time, enough space and enough pieces to play with, statistically anything may happen. This day, a billion years ago, such a star did go supernova, and sent hurtling through space was a piece of an alien planet, almost ten miles in length and four miles across at its widest point. The life that was once nourished by the light from that sun—plants and animals much unlike anything we would ever recognize on Earth—would never be again, would never awaken to a new sunrise, a new day. The blackened, charred, sliver of a planet was sent on a journey that would end as it begun: in a fiery cataclysm. As its environment was shattered and disrupted, it too was about to do the same to a very unsuspecting planet, in the solar system of a very average star, in a remote corner of the Milky Way galaxy.

  Susan was snapped out of her vigil at the porthole by the sounds of the Everly Brothers singing “Wake Up Little Suzy”—mission control’s idea of a little joke to keep things light. She had been anticipating this song all mission long and was surprised that it took them this long to get to it. Actually, Susan welcomed the temporary distraction as she made her way to the shuttle’s flight deck to check the status display for the condition of her shuttle. All systems showed nominal, so there should be no delay in the satellite rendezvous coming up this morning.

  Ivan was the first to emerge from the cocoon of his sleeping bag. He had no trouble sleeping on the shuttle, being a veteran of many months on MIR, and was always the first up and ready to tackle the NASA cuisine that would now be called breakfast. He was sometimes referred to as “Chef Ivan” because he prepared the food for everyone, especially if they were not at the “table” on time. He claimed it came from being the big brother to four brothers and one sister who trained him for kitchen duty. As Susan came down from the flight deck, Ivan floated by, smiling and humming “Wake up little Suzy” none too softly. He looked closely at Susan and his expression grew serious. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m okay. Ready to grab SCIEXSAT after breakfast!” Susan replied, trying to sound excited.

  Ivan gave her a long look. “You are sure everything is okay? You look troubled.”

  Susan took a deep breath and said, “No, really, I’m doing fine.”

  “Okay, you are the boss,” Ivan said,
and then resumed humming his tune as he floated on his way.

  Susan had grown to like Ivan a lot. Her first encounter with him left her a little concerned that he was too gung-ho with his experience as a military pilot and a cosmonaut, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that he was quite warm and friendly, and he took his responsibilities seriously. Over the years that they trained together she found that she really appreciated his wisdom and humor. He coached her on the trials and tribulations of life in space, as well as the intricacies of flying in space. She helped him with his English and the challenges of living in the United States.

  Ivan was on this mission as a warm-up to taking a position on the International Space Station next year, if all went well. The relationship between Russia and the United States had warmed considerably in the last few years, which made it easier for the exchange of technology, resources, and people. Ivan took to flying the shuttle like a proverbial fish to water and fell into the NASA routine with ease. As a testament to his piloting skills, the docking with the space station went well considering that one of the shuttle’s thrusters had become intermittent at the worst possible time.

  Breakfast went as usual with the right amount of camaraderie and business. Between slurping up balls of floating orange juice and eating their eggs and toast, they discussed the procedures they would be going through to catch the satellite.

  “So, Jill, are you ready to earn your space wings?” Susan asked.